Picking up from where we left off...
Researchers may feel that ASCs are the thing that sets shamans apart from their clients- but presence of ASCs is not necessarily an important defining feature of shamans from an emic perspective. (p.313)
Some people argue that shamanism gives people access to a type of revelatory information which mainstream Western society lacks (from the context given, I'm uncertain exactly what sort of information we're talking about, but I'm guessing it's information about how to handle individuals' transitions between different social roles, like from childhood to adulthood). R. Ridington argues that actually, it's not that the modern West lacks this information, but that the distribution of this information is centralised. This means that our society de-emphasises the importance of individual transformations (since we've got institutions that are designed to make them routine), and focuses instead societal or political transformations (since these affect institutions, and thus millions of individual people) (p.312). Or, I think that's what he's saying. I'll have to chase up the original article.
A. Siikala argues that a shaman communicating with spirit is basically a person taking on different roles, using techniques which in the West are referred to as 'hypnosis' (p.312). Noll apparently argues that the defining feature of shamans is not that they see visions, per se, but the fact that they go into a controlled visionary state and then actively engage with the visions they encounter (presumably in contrast to, say, possessed people) (p.313). Dreams may be very important in shamanic practice, but their role hasn't really been emphasised by most social scientists (at least, not since Tylor) (p.313). Atkinson argues that Western social scientists have a tendency to stress the idea of shamanism as a kind of alternative medicine because this makes it easier for us to understand (whereas if you stress the idea of shamanism as a religious practice, then more social scientists are likely to see it as weird and scary).
Additionally, comparing shamans to doctors or psychotherapists can sometimes be a way of mocking the latter professions, by suggesting they're not as 'scientific' as they think they are (to be fair, some psychotherapists, notably Jungians, have responded by trying to apply shamanic insights to their own theories) (p.313-4). Various people have offered explanations for why shamanic healing works- the usual ones involve psychotherapy and/or the placebo effect, although Kulcsar has apparently suggested that !Kung trancers might treat people by way of sweating out opiates and then rubbing them into their patients' skin (p.313). An increasing number of researchers are reacting against the tendency to portray shamans as ethereal and otherworldly, by looking at how they have reacted to political movements like colonialism and ethnic conflict (p.315-7).
Some people define 'shamans' as people who adopt a relatively commanding attitude towards the spirits they communicate with; giving them instructions in an authoritative way rather than adopting a supplicatory attitude towards them. This is supposed to be what distinguishes them from other kinds of people who communicate with supernatural beings, like priests or possession mediums. Eliade went so far as to say that shamanism never involves possession and always includes some sort of out-of-body experience or belief in magical flight. The difficulty with this is that Lewis' research suggests that the archetypal shamans (the Tungus ritualists from whom we get the name) do actually engage in all the stuff Eliade said we needed to exclude from the definition of 'shamanism' (p.317).
Still, it's possible to argue that shamanism involves more of a commanding attitude towards spirits than possession cults* do. However, it sounds like a possible upshot of this approach is that women who communicate with spirits are less likely to be labelled 'shamans', at least when researchers are working in cultures where women are expected to adopt a relatively meek and placatory attitude in public (whether they are talking to mortal men or to spirits). It seems to me like the same might hold for cultures where men are generally expected to adopt a concilliatory sort of attitude towards others (I don't know enough about Japan to state this with confidence, but maybe this would be one example- perhaps this is why Shinto ritualists are referred to as 'priests' rather than 'shamans'?) (p.317).
Another implication of this line of thought is that it may undermine the argument that possession cults represent a unique opportunity for marginal people to seize some power for themselves (by claiming to be possessed by a very powerful and authoritative spirit). This argument seems to be largely based on the idea that a disproportionate number of possessed people are female, poor, transgendered or in some other way disqualified for most routes to power. If the only difference between possession cults and shamanism is the degree to which a researcher sees their leaders as acting in an authoritative way, then there may be a tendency to label cults made up of women and poor people as 'possession cults', while cults composed of men and local political leaders are referred to as 'shamanism'. That could imply that the whole thing is a definitional tautology, not a causation issue- that is, rather than it being the case that possession cults attract marginal people, or that marginalised cults place a greater emphasis on possession, it could just be that marginal cults get labelled as 'possession cults' rather than 'shamanism' at the point where researchers get involved.
Having said this, I need to get around to reading Lewis' Ecstatic Religion, so maybe I'm overstating the critique- for example, if it turned out that there's some sort of well-defined difference between 'possession' and 'shamanic trance', then the basic argument would still hold. The argument would also hold up if it turned out that in most cultures low-status people can get away with speaking authoritatively to spirits, whether or not they're considered to be 'possessed' at the time (cf p.317, although I'm not sure to what extent Atkinson would agree with what I'm saying here).
There's also the complicating factor that women in many cultures HAVE been labelled as 'shamans' by researchers (e.g. see Koreans, Inuit, Taiwanese shamans, p.317-8). I'd be interested in knowing whether these researchers are also using the 'person who speaks authoritatively to spirits' definition of 'shaman'. It might be that different regional specialists have gotten into the habit of using the word in different ways- or, alternatively, I could just be talking rubbish.
One person who apparently DOES use a definition of 'shamanism' at odds with the 'authoritative spirit-communicator' model is Taussig, who apparently emphasises the idea of 'shamans' being people whose main role involves disrupting and decentering power structures (it's not clear from this whether he thinks this is shamanism's emic raison d'etre, either from the perspective of shamans or their clients; or if he thinks that this is just the EFFECT which shamanism has on a culture, regardless of whether shamans intend it). Atkinson argues that this needs to be balanced against shamans' efforts to maintain order, whether this is at an individual, household or community level (p.319).
So, to sum up, the definitions of 'shaman' identified by this article would seem to be:
-a specific kind of ritualist found in certain cultures in Siberia and perhaps also Central Asia.
-an outdated and potentially ethnocentric term for ritualists from any culture who strike Westerners as 'exotic'
-someone who has a mental illness but lives in a culture which does not recognise it as such (this definition seems to have fallen out of favour)
-any ritualist who experiences ASCs.
-a ritualist who experiences a specific kind of ASC called an SSC (which may be objectively identifiable via brain scanning)
-someone who uses hypnosis to take on different roles or alter egos as part of their religious practice
-someone who goes into a controlled trance and actively engages with the spirits they encounter
-someone who adopts a commanding attitude when communicating with spirits
-the above, plus also must have out-of-body experiences and/or the sensation of magical flight. Does not usually experience spirit possession
-a ritualist who disrupts and decentres power structures
*Just to reiterate: 'cult' here isn't meant in the pejorative sense, just in the sense of a subset of a wider religious tradition.
Thursday 25 December 2008
Reading 'Shamanisms Today' by Jane Monnig Atkinson (Part 1)
(1992, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, pp.307-30)
I'm in a pedantic mood, so this summary may drag on quite a bit. Also, the review article is very good, but it's almost 20 years old now. I'm going to stick with the present tense when discussing the current state of play, but obviously it's possible that the debate has shifted since then.
Geertz and Taussig felt shamanism was a dead category. Various people have tried deconstructing it, pointing out that there's a lot of variation between different kinds of shaman in Siberia (where the word comes from), let alone in the world as a whole. People have also argued that it's probably better to analyse ritualists in the context of their own culture and the people who attend their rituals, rather than comparing them to fellow 'shamans' who might have lived a century ago and on a different continent). As an upshot, D.H. Holmberg argues that 'shamanism' should no longer be considered worth discussing as a global phenomenon, in the same way that 'totemism' no longer is. This kind of sentiment means that people who are still interested in doing comparative studies on shamanism often struggle to find the kind of case studies they need- not because people aren't researching the kind of rituals they're interested in, but because this research doesn't use the word 'shaman' and so mostly ends up getting read by regional specialists (p.307-9).
However, Atkinson reckons that since the 80's we've seen a resurgence of interest in 'shamanism' from various disciplines, especially psychology. Crucially, psychologists have argued that it doesn't matter how much cultural variation there is within 'shamanism', because the phenomenon is unified on a neurological level. That is, 'shamans' can be defined as people who pursue a particular kind of ASC (altered state of consciousness)- it doesn't matter if they pursue it in different ways, or construct different kinds of religious model to explain it. Similar views are held by many of the Westerners who are interested in exploring ASCs themselves (e.g. people in the Pagan and New Age movements) (p.308).
Meanwhile, those ethnographers who continue use the term 'shamanism' apparently often do so simply because they find it a convenient gloss for some specific local practice. These ethnographers aren't necessarily going to be interested in asking questions like "to what extent do the people I call 'shamans' resemble the people who other researchers have labelled 'shamans'?" (p.309)
There's a debate that went on for several decades over whether shamans in other cultures are experiencing what our culture normally calls 'symptoms of a mental disorder', such as schizophrenic delusions. It looks like that debate has now petered out, with the general consensus being 'no'- or at least, it's not as straightforward as saying shamanism is a symptom of mental illness in and of itself (although in some cultures the rate of mental disorders may be higher among shamans than among the community at large, e.g. because people with chronic health problems like mental illness are more likely to study shamanic techniques in order to treat the problem) (p.310).
So these days, 'shamanism' is still seen as being defined by abnormal mental states, but they're referred to as 'ASCs' or 'trance' rather than 'symptoms of mental illness' (Atkinson thinks these terms were chosen because they sound more academic than Eliade's term, 'ecstasy'). Some researchers go so far as to say that all shamans experience a specific kind of ASC, which Harner refers to as an SSC ('shamanic state of consciousness'), while other researchers argue this same ASC is characteristic of all religious experiences, not just shamanic ones. Others treat the words 'shamanism' and 'ASC' as being basically synonymous. Meanwhile, R. Walsh has attempted to to categorise ASCs involved in shamanism and compare them to those involved in yoga or Buddhist meditation. There is relatively little consensus between these researchers over whether ASCs associated with 'shamanism' should be considered distinct from those associated with 'possession' (p.310).
There's been some speculation that shamanism might be associated with a specific type of unusual brain state (P.A. Wright goes so far as to claim that he can identify a specific brain state associated with SSC and distinct from those associated with possession, although it sounds like at the time of Atkinson's articles, it remained to be seen whether this result would be replicated). In general, it sounds like the amount of actual experimental research on the brains of practicing shamans is relatively low in comparison to the amount of speculation about what might be going on, but maybe that's been corrected by now (p.311).
Obviously all this focus on individual mental states, especially individual brain states, is going to trigger the anti-reductionism response in anthropologists, who are going to want to read the behaviour in terms of the sociocultural context. Atkinson herself argues that "to analyze shamanism primarily as a trance phenomenon is akin to analyzing marriage solely as a
function of reproductive biology" (p.311).
I'm in a pedantic mood, so this summary may drag on quite a bit. Also, the review article is very good, but it's almost 20 years old now. I'm going to stick with the present tense when discussing the current state of play, but obviously it's possible that the debate has shifted since then.
Geertz and Taussig felt shamanism was a dead category. Various people have tried deconstructing it, pointing out that there's a lot of variation between different kinds of shaman in Siberia (where the word comes from), let alone in the world as a whole. People have also argued that it's probably better to analyse ritualists in the context of their own culture and the people who attend their rituals, rather than comparing them to fellow 'shamans' who might have lived a century ago and on a different continent). As an upshot, D.H. Holmberg argues that 'shamanism' should no longer be considered worth discussing as a global phenomenon, in the same way that 'totemism' no longer is. This kind of sentiment means that people who are still interested in doing comparative studies on shamanism often struggle to find the kind of case studies they need- not because people aren't researching the kind of rituals they're interested in, but because this research doesn't use the word 'shaman' and so mostly ends up getting read by regional specialists (p.307-9).
However, Atkinson reckons that since the 80's we've seen a resurgence of interest in 'shamanism' from various disciplines, especially psychology. Crucially, psychologists have argued that it doesn't matter how much cultural variation there is within 'shamanism', because the phenomenon is unified on a neurological level. That is, 'shamans' can be defined as people who pursue a particular kind of ASC (altered state of consciousness)- it doesn't matter if they pursue it in different ways, or construct different kinds of religious model to explain it. Similar views are held by many of the Westerners who are interested in exploring ASCs themselves (e.g. people in the Pagan and New Age movements) (p.308).
Meanwhile, those ethnographers who continue use the term 'shamanism' apparently often do so simply because they find it a convenient gloss for some specific local practice. These ethnographers aren't necessarily going to be interested in asking questions like "to what extent do the people I call 'shamans' resemble the people who other researchers have labelled 'shamans'?" (p.309)
There's a debate that went on for several decades over whether shamans in other cultures are experiencing what our culture normally calls 'symptoms of a mental disorder', such as schizophrenic delusions. It looks like that debate has now petered out, with the general consensus being 'no'- or at least, it's not as straightforward as saying shamanism is a symptom of mental illness in and of itself (although in some cultures the rate of mental disorders may be higher among shamans than among the community at large, e.g. because people with chronic health problems like mental illness are more likely to study shamanic techniques in order to treat the problem) (p.310).
So these days, 'shamanism' is still seen as being defined by abnormal mental states, but they're referred to as 'ASCs' or 'trance' rather than 'symptoms of mental illness' (Atkinson thinks these terms were chosen because they sound more academic than Eliade's term, 'ecstasy'). Some researchers go so far as to say that all shamans experience a specific kind of ASC, which Harner refers to as an SSC ('shamanic state of consciousness'), while other researchers argue this same ASC is characteristic of all religious experiences, not just shamanic ones. Others treat the words 'shamanism' and 'ASC' as being basically synonymous. Meanwhile, R. Walsh has attempted to to categorise ASCs involved in shamanism and compare them to those involved in yoga or Buddhist meditation. There is relatively little consensus between these researchers over whether ASCs associated with 'shamanism' should be considered distinct from those associated with 'possession' (p.310).
There's been some speculation that shamanism might be associated with a specific type of unusual brain state (P.A. Wright goes so far as to claim that he can identify a specific brain state associated with SSC and distinct from those associated with possession, although it sounds like at the time of Atkinson's articles, it remained to be seen whether this result would be replicated). In general, it sounds like the amount of actual experimental research on the brains of practicing shamans is relatively low in comparison to the amount of speculation about what might be going on, but maybe that's been corrected by now (p.311).
Obviously all this focus on individual mental states, especially individual brain states, is going to trigger the anti-reductionism response in anthropologists, who are going to want to read the behaviour in terms of the sociocultural context. Atkinson herself argues that "to analyze shamanism primarily as a trance phenomenon is akin to analyzing marriage solely as a
function of reproductive biology" (p.311).
Tuesday 23 December 2008
Some fun quotes from 'Adam, Pre-Adamites, and Extra-Terrestrial Beings in Early Modern Europe' by Philip Almond
2006, Journal of Religious History, 30, 2, pp.163-174
Almond's article is about the way in which geographical exploration and conquest led some 17th-century European intellectuals to speculate about how the peoples of the 'new world' fit into existing beliefs about humanity (e.g., how they'd arrived on distant continents without large ships, why they looked and acted differently to Europeans, etc). In particular, it focuses on the arguments that maybe indigenous Americans were descended from someone other than Adam (which potentially explained where Cain's wife came from, but raised a whole host of other questions about whether this meant Native Americans were subject to Original Sin, whether they were included in Christ's Atonement, even whether they were fully 'human').
Around the same kind of time, the development of heliocentric astronomy (and thus, the conclusion that the Earth wasn't necessarily all that special astronomically speaking) led some people to start speculating about life on other planets (and thus about the theological status of aliens).
Some random emic quotes I liked:
An interesting theory of Lamarckian runaway selection in Ethiopians:
-William Nicholls, 1696, A Conference With a Theist (quoted p.170)
Almond's article is about the way in which geographical exploration and conquest led some 17th-century European intellectuals to speculate about how the peoples of the 'new world' fit into existing beliefs about humanity (e.g., how they'd arrived on distant continents without large ships, why they looked and acted differently to Europeans, etc). In particular, it focuses on the arguments that maybe indigenous Americans were descended from someone other than Adam (which potentially explained where Cain's wife came from, but raised a whole host of other questions about whether this meant Native Americans were subject to Original Sin, whether they were included in Christ's Atonement, even whether they were fully 'human').
Around the same kind of time, the development of heliocentric astronomy (and thus, the conclusion that the Earth wasn't necessarily all that special astronomically speaking) led some people to start speculating about life on other planets (and thus about the theological status of aliens).
Some random emic quotes I liked:
"All the Australians are of both Sexes, or Hermaphrodites, and if it happens that a child is born but of one, they strangle him as a Monster."-Gabriel de Foigny, 1693, A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, quoted p.163. According to a quote from one of de Foigny's imaginary informants, this also meant that they lived "without being sensible of any of these Animal Ardours one for another, and we cannot bear them spoke of without horrour: Our Love has nothing Carnall, nor Brutall in it." Instead, children grew inside them like fruit.
“the different Soyls, or various Modifications of Matter in several parts of the World, [produce] Men of different Colours and Complexions.”-Thomas Robinson, 1694, The Anatomy of the Earth, quoted p.170
An interesting theory of Lamarckian runaway selection in Ethiopians:
"in a Generation or two, that high degree of Tawniness became the nature, and from thence the Pride of the Inhabitants; the men began to value themselves chiefly upon this complexion, and the Women to affect them the better for it; from thence by the love to the Male so complexioned, the daily conversation with him and the affectation of his hew, there was caused a considerable Influence upon the Foetus’s which the females were pregnant with; so that, upon this account, the Children in Aethiopia became more and more black, according to the fancy of the Mother."
-William Nicholls, 1696, A Conference With a Theist (quoted p.170)
"Now can any one look upon, and compare these Systems together, without being amazed at the vast Magnitude and noble attendance of these two Planets, in respect of this pitiful little Earth of ours? Or can they force themselves to think, that the wise Creator has so disposed of all his Plants and Animals here, has furnish’d and adorn’d this Spot only, and has left all those Worlds bare and destitute of Inhabitants, who might adore and worship him; or that those prodigious Bodies were made only to twinkle to, and be studied by some few perhaps of us poor fellows?"
-Christian Huygens, 1698, The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, quoted p.171
"God therefore may have joined immaterial souls, even of the same class and capacities in their separate state, to other kind of bodies, and in other laws of union; and from those different laws of union there will arise quite different affections, and natures, and species of the compound beings. So that we ought not upon any account to conclude, that if there be rational inhabitants in the moon or Mars, or any unknown planets of other systems, they must therefore have human nature, or be involved in the circumstances of our world."
-Richard Bentley, quoted p.173
Saturday 20 December 2008
Reading: '"Why Are You Mixing What Cannot Be Mixed?" Shared Devotions in the Monotheisms', by Dionigi Albera
(2008, History and Anthropology, 19, 1, pp.37-59)
A major chunk of this essay is focused on responding to arguments made by R.M. Hayden in his 2002 essay 'Antagonistic tolerance: competitive sharing of religious sites in South Asia and Balkans' (Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 205–231). Unfortunately, I haven't read this essay, so I don't know how accurate Albera's critique is. So here's an attempt at a third-hand summary: some people argue that if you have a shrine at which people from two different religious traditions worship side by side, then this is evidence of religious tolerance*. Hayden argues that in fact, shared shrines can be vehicles for conflict between the two traditions (he uses the phrases 'competitive sharing' and 'antagonistic tolerance'). For example, shared use of a shrine may be something that happens when one side pragmatically decides that they can't get away with totally repressing the other side's rituals, and so their best bet is just to take control of them themselves (p.39).
Albera thinks that Hayden is overstating his case, to the extent that "syncretism, in his view, is always a more or less disguised form of competition. The tolerance is under no circumstances genuine. [...] From this point of view, even the crossing of the borders between the groups is only tactical ground recognition of another’s domain, a temporary form of compromise tolerated by a weak minority, or accepted by a majority momentarily blocked in its will to dominate. The direction is clear: in the end a group is bound to triumph over the others and to impose its monopoly of the sacred site." (p.39)
Hayden apparently also applies Barth's theories of ethnicity to religion. I assume this means he's arguing that when analysing religions, we should be focusing on the way in which religious groups emically define the borders between themselves and other religions (and asking: under what cirumstances do people try to cross those borders?). This strikes me as a reasonably sensible idea- at least, it seems to work with ethnicity (or at any rate, it seems more productive than, say, trying to make a definitive list of all the key properties of a particular ethnic group). However, Albera argues that it's not necessarily helpful to think of religious groups as having 'borders' in this way (p.39).
Hayden apparently does acknowledge that there are likely to be differences between the way in which ordinary people see the relationship between different religions in their everyday local environment, vs the way in which religious or political leaders talk about these relationships (apparently Nandy called this the distinction between 'religion as faith' and 'religion as ideology', but I'm not convinced I like those terms. 'Ideology' and 'faith' are words that sound conceptually slippery and not especially value-neutral). But Albera thinks Hayden doesn't follow this up enough, leading to the impression that he sees 'Hindus', 'Muslims' etc as undifferentiated blocs (p.39).
Albera also thinks Hayden needs to be clearer about when he's referring to syncretism in the sense that there's one shrine which is used for rituals from multiple religious traditions, or in the sense that the rituals themselves contain elements from more than one tradition (p.39). This seems like an important point. Albera points to Fredrik Hasluck's set of three categories: "conversion, intrusion and identification. The circulation of a series of legends may suggest that a saint belonging to religion A was in fact secretly converted to religion B; that the mausoleum of a saint of religion B also housed the tomb of a saint of religion A; that the holy person of religion A was actually the transfiguration of a saint of religion B." (p.51 in Albera; original reference is Hasluck, F. W. (2000), Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans, ed. Margareth M. Hasluck, The Isis Press, Istanbul (originally published by Clarendon Press, New York, 1929, p.457-8). Albera further stresses that we need to think in terms of "a range that can go from a simple proximity to imitation, borrowing and blending." (p.55)
Albera's decided to illuminate this issue by looking at the Meditteranean. Most people assume that there's a major fault line in this area between Christianity and Islam (cf Huntington's Clash of Civilisations). This view is backed up by obvious examples from places like Kosovo. There's also the fact that both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic and hence relatively exclusivist. Both religions tolerate a certain amount of syncretism between their own rituals and the 'pagan' traditions of convert populations (e.g. by converting formerly worshipped deities into saints), but it's harder to picture a way for either religion to compromise when faced by a rival monotheism (p.40). Having said this,Bahá'í seems to cope ok- but maybe that's a sign that in order to officially syncretise two or more creedal monotheisms, you need to expend a lot of effort on explaining how you intend to integrate their doctrine. Most of the stuff Albera discusses in this essay involves popular religion rather than top-down initiatives (the fact that most Abrahamic syncretisms seem to be local popular worship rather than officially sanctioned stuff may also explain why women often seem to be heavily involved in syncretic worship- see p.52).
There's some evidence for syncretism between Judaism and some early Christian churches (e.g. Christians attending synagogues in Antioch, Thessalonia's Basilica of Saint Anthony attracting Christians, Jews and pagans) (p.41). For some reason, though, later Christians don't seem to have co-worshipped with Jews very much at all- and when they do, Muslims tend to be involved too- e.g. at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. As Albera notes, you'd expect to see more Christian-Muslim syncretism than Christian-Jew or Jew-Muslim even all religions were equally willing to syncretise with each other, purely because the number of Jews in the world is smaller. But this can't be the idea story, because rates of Muslim-Jew syncretism seem relatively high (p.44). There's also the fact that, in general, Islamic nations have been more open to allowing resident communities of religious minorities than Christian nations have been- so the opportunities for closer interactions are higher (p.42).
Having said all this, you still have situations of exclusively Muslim-Christian shared sites, like 15th century Mount Sinai. The Christian pilgrim Felix Fabri records that he and his companions prayed at Sinai chapel in 1483 and found Muslims worshipping in the adjacent mosque. This didn't seem to perturb them, since Fabri calmly notes that “men of all rites and all sects flocked here from all parts of the world” to venerate Moses. However, Fabri further notes that neither Muslims nor Christians would tolerate the presence of Jews at the site (p.45). After the emergence of Islam, churches and mosques sometimes shared the same courtyard (or even the same building- there's evidence that the shift towards more geometric motifs in the mosaics of the Church of St Stephen in Jordan happened so that strongly aniconic Muslims using the building to worship wouldn't be offended by art depicting living beings (p.42).)
Sometimes when historical Muslim writers describe visiting Christian churches, it sounds like they were mainly there as tourists attracted by their hospitality and tranquil gardens. At other times, it sounds like churches represented a kind of forbidden fruit, by offering the opportunity to consume alcohol or "the prospect of establishing relationships with Christian women or with young monks (one of the most famous Muslims poets, Abu Nuwas, who lived between the eighth and the ninth century, sang in his verses of his desire for a young monk)" (p.42). But sometimes they were also drawn to churches for religious reasons- some Muslims attended Christian festivals or even services, worshipped icons and relics, sought healing or made vows.
Random interesting quote: "There is in Algiers, rue Sainte, a small synagogue on an old marabout: when the last Muslim oukil, Sheikh Khider died in the last century, without a successor, he left, by title deed, the local to a rabbi friend, with the clause that Muslims would be allowed to come. The curious fact is that Muslim women continue to come, when a thâleb told them that this could help to cure sterility or avoid repudiation. They revolve seven times around the teba, the podium of the readers of the Torah, which is roughly in the middle of the room and that even during the office, without troubling the assistants and without the latter troubling them." -recorded by Emile Dermenghem, 1954, quoted p.50
"Sometimes homonymy has been the vehicle of assimilation, as in the case of the cult of Saint Thecla in Istanbul, which after the Turkish conquest was replaced by that of Toklu (orDoghlu) Dede (see Hasluck 2000: 66)." (p.51) (quoted because it will amuse Bunny).
A small thing that seemed a bit odd to me- in Albera's conclusion, he makes the offhand remark that "even in their most intransigent constituent—behaviour related to religion—civilizations appear contradictory and inhabited by diversity" (p.54). Is Albera using the wordintransigent to mean 'uncompromising'? If so, I'm not sure I understand why he thinks religion is civilisations' most intransigent constituent- there are lots of things civilisations are unwilling to compromise over (e.g. their political and economic systems)- I'm not sure why he seems to be saying that religion is necessarily more fixed and inflexible than anything else.
One other interesting quote: "This inspired the famous observation of Pierre Bayle (1740: 265): “Mohammedans, according to the principles of their faith, are obliged to use violence to destroy other religions, and still they tolerated them for several centuries. Christians have received order to preach and educate, and nevertheless from immemorial time they exterminate by iron and fire those who are not of their religion.” -Pierre Bayle, 1740, from Brunel's Dictionnaire historique et critique (quoted p.56). This strikes me as one of those quotes which are pithy but rather oversimplified- still, it might be interesting to see if there's a proper critique from anyone who knows more about the topic than I do.
* On the surface of things, this seems like a fairly reasonable assumption- I was somewhat confused when Hardacre didn't seem to find it plausible when she was discussing the relationship between Shinto and Buddhist priests at shared shrines in pre-Meiji Japan (she definitely wasn't citing Hayden to support this, because she was writing well before 'Antagonistic tolerance' was published, but she might have been drawing on a similar argument from someone else).
A major chunk of this essay is focused on responding to arguments made by R.M. Hayden in his 2002 essay 'Antagonistic tolerance: competitive sharing of religious sites in South Asia and Balkans' (Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 205–231). Unfortunately, I haven't read this essay, so I don't know how accurate Albera's critique is. So here's an attempt at a third-hand summary: some people argue that if you have a shrine at which people from two different religious traditions worship side by side, then this is evidence of religious tolerance*. Hayden argues that in fact, shared shrines can be vehicles for conflict between the two traditions (he uses the phrases 'competitive sharing' and 'antagonistic tolerance'). For example, shared use of a shrine may be something that happens when one side pragmatically decides that they can't get away with totally repressing the other side's rituals, and so their best bet is just to take control of them themselves (p.39).
Albera thinks that Hayden is overstating his case, to the extent that "syncretism, in his view, is always a more or less disguised form of competition. The tolerance is under no circumstances genuine. [...] From this point of view, even the crossing of the borders between the groups is only tactical ground recognition of another’s domain, a temporary form of compromise tolerated by a weak minority, or accepted by a majority momentarily blocked in its will to dominate. The direction is clear: in the end a group is bound to triumph over the others and to impose its monopoly of the sacred site." (p.39)
Hayden apparently also applies Barth's theories of ethnicity to religion. I assume this means he's arguing that when analysing religions, we should be focusing on the way in which religious groups emically define the borders between themselves and other religions (and asking: under what cirumstances do people try to cross those borders?). This strikes me as a reasonably sensible idea- at least, it seems to work with ethnicity (or at any rate, it seems more productive than, say, trying to make a definitive list of all the key properties of a particular ethnic group). However, Albera argues that it's not necessarily helpful to think of religious groups as having 'borders' in this way (p.39).
Hayden apparently does acknowledge that there are likely to be differences between the way in which ordinary people see the relationship between different religions in their everyday local environment, vs the way in which religious or political leaders talk about these relationships (apparently Nandy called this the distinction between 'religion as faith' and 'religion as ideology', but I'm not convinced I like those terms. 'Ideology' and 'faith' are words that sound conceptually slippery and not especially value-neutral). But Albera thinks Hayden doesn't follow this up enough, leading to the impression that he sees 'Hindus', 'Muslims' etc as undifferentiated blocs (p.39).
Albera also thinks Hayden needs to be clearer about when he's referring to syncretism in the sense that there's one shrine which is used for rituals from multiple religious traditions, or in the sense that the rituals themselves contain elements from more than one tradition (p.39). This seems like an important point. Albera points to Fredrik Hasluck's set of three categories: "conversion, intrusion and identification. The circulation of a series of legends may suggest that a saint belonging to religion A was in fact secretly converted to religion B; that the mausoleum of a saint of religion B also housed the tomb of a saint of religion A; that the holy person of religion A was actually the transfiguration of a saint of religion B." (p.51 in Albera; original reference is Hasluck, F. W. (2000), Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans, ed. Margareth M. Hasluck, The Isis Press, Istanbul (originally published by Clarendon Press, New York, 1929, p.457-8). Albera further stresses that we need to think in terms of "a range that can go from a simple proximity to imitation, borrowing and blending." (p.55)
Albera's decided to illuminate this issue by looking at the Meditteranean. Most people assume that there's a major fault line in this area between Christianity and Islam (cf Huntington's Clash of Civilisations). This view is backed up by obvious examples from places like Kosovo. There's also the fact that both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic and hence relatively exclusivist. Both religions tolerate a certain amount of syncretism between their own rituals and the 'pagan' traditions of convert populations (e.g. by converting formerly worshipped deities into saints), but it's harder to picture a way for either religion to compromise when faced by a rival monotheism (p.40). Having said this,
There's some evidence for syncretism between Judaism and some early Christian churches (e.g. Christians attending synagogues in Antioch, Thessalonia's Basilica of Saint Anthony attracting Christians, Jews and pagans) (p.41). For some reason, though, later Christians don't seem to have co-worshipped with Jews very much at all- and when they do, Muslims tend to be involved too- e.g. at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. As Albera notes, you'd expect to see more Christian-Muslim syncretism than Christian-Jew or Jew-Muslim even all religions were equally willing to syncretise with each other, purely because the number of Jews in the world is smaller. But this can't be the idea story, because rates of Muslim-Jew syncretism seem relatively high (p.44). There's also the fact that, in general, Islamic nations have been more open to allowing resident communities of religious minorities than Christian nations have been- so the opportunities for closer interactions are higher (p.42).
Having said all this, you still have situations of exclusively Muslim-Christian shared sites, like 15th century Mount Sinai. The Christian pilgrim Felix Fabri records that he and his companions prayed at Sinai chapel in 1483 and found Muslims worshipping in the adjacent mosque. This didn't seem to perturb them, since Fabri calmly notes that “men of all rites and all sects flocked here from all parts of the world” to venerate Moses. However, Fabri further notes that neither Muslims nor Christians would tolerate the presence of Jews at the site (p.45). After the emergence of Islam, churches and mosques sometimes shared the same courtyard (or even the same building- there's evidence that the shift towards more geometric motifs in the mosaics of the Church of St Stephen in Jordan happened so that strongly aniconic Muslims using the building to worship wouldn't be offended by art depicting living beings (p.42).)
Sometimes when historical Muslim writers describe visiting Christian churches, it sounds like they were mainly there as tourists attracted by their hospitality and tranquil gardens. At other times, it sounds like churches represented a kind of forbidden fruit, by offering the opportunity to consume alcohol or "the prospect of establishing relationships with Christian women or with young monks (one of the most famous Muslims poets, Abu Nuwas, who lived between the eighth and the ninth century, sang in his verses of his desire for a young monk)" (p.42). But sometimes they were also drawn to churches for religious reasons- some Muslims attended Christian festivals or even services, worshipped icons and relics, sought healing or made vows.
Random interesting quote: "There is in Algiers, rue Sainte, a small synagogue on an old marabout: when the last Muslim oukil, Sheikh Khider died in the last century, without a successor, he left, by title deed, the local to a rabbi friend, with the clause that Muslims would be allowed to come. The curious fact is that Muslim women continue to come, when a thâleb told them that this could help to cure sterility or avoid repudiation. They revolve seven times around the teba, the podium of the readers of the Torah, which is roughly in the middle of the room and that even during the office, without troubling the assistants and without the latter troubling them." -recorded by Emile Dermenghem, 1954, quoted p.50
"Sometimes homonymy has been the vehicle of assimilation, as in the case of the cult of Saint Thecla in Istanbul, which after the Turkish conquest was replaced by that of Toklu (orDoghlu) Dede (see Hasluck 2000: 66)." (p.51) (quoted because it will amuse Bunny).
A small thing that seemed a bit odd to me- in Albera's conclusion, he makes the offhand remark that "even in their most intransigent constituent—behaviour related to religion—civilizations appear contradictory and inhabited by diversity" (p.54). Is Albera using the word
One other interesting quote: "This inspired the famous observation of Pierre Bayle (1740: 265): “Mohammedans, according to the principles of their faith, are obliged to use violence to destroy other religions, and still they tolerated them for several centuries. Christians have received order to preach and educate, and nevertheless from immemorial time they exterminate by iron and fire those who are not of their religion.” -Pierre Bayle, 1740, from Brunel's Dictionnaire historique et critique (quoted p.56). This strikes me as one of those quotes which are pithy but rather oversimplified- still, it might be interesting to see if there's a proper critique from anyone who knows more about the topic than I do.
* On the surface of things, this seems like a fairly reasonable assumption- I was somewhat confused when Hardacre didn't seem to find it plausible when she was discussing the relationship between Shinto and Buddhist priests at shared shrines in pre-Meiji Japan (she definitely wasn't citing Hayden to support this, because she was writing well before 'Antagonistic tolerance' was published, but she might have been drawing on a similar argument from someone else).
Thursday 4 December 2008
Reading 'Shinto and the State: 1868-1988', Introduction and Chapter 1
(Helen Hardacre, 1989, Princeton: Princeton University Press)
I'm somewhat disappointed by this book. I think that's probably a result of mistaken expectations, though. It would probably be a pretty useful book if you were planning on doing a project on Shinto and had a bunch of other sources, but wanted to check you'd covered all the key events during a certain period. Hardacre also explicitly states that she decided to devote minimal attention to the excitingly-controversial WW2 period, since so much has already been written about it in relation to Shinto. That's a reasonable decision, but the end result was a book which felt quite dry and left me feeling like there were lots of things she'd brought up which I would have liked her to go into more detail about (in particular, the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism).
If I'm reading Hardacre right, then here's a potted summary of Shinto's development over the last couple of centuries. It sounds as though Shinto in the mid-nineteenth century was pretty similar to traditional Chinese polytheism (in the sense that it didn't really exist as a unified entity with its own name or institutions, and ordinary people didn't have any issues about mixing and matching it with Buddhism). At least, they sound pretty similar at a village level- I know virtually nothing about how pre-20th century Chinese religion worked at a government level, so I'm not sure how the comparison holds up in that respect.
Hardacre stresses that up until the late nineteenth-century priests who worshipped the kami (Shinto gods) were markedly low-status compared to Buddhist priests. This was apparently made quite clear by the Japanese system of formal ettiquette (for example, Shinto priests got seated lower than Buddhist clerics at village assemblies- p.15). True, the imperial court patronised both Buddhist and Shinto rituals, but in the Tokugawa era the real power (and hence the money to fund rituals) lay with the Shogunate, who sound as though they didn't hold the kami in particularly high esteem (or at any rate, they don't seem to have stressed the relationship between themselves and the kami in order to legitimate their power, as later Japanese governments have done) (p.11).
Most Shinto shrines were located within Buddhist temples, and only staffed parttime. Shinto priests were also all legally required to register with Buddhist temples and receive Buddhist funeral services when they died. Meanwhile, the kami were referred to as the protectors of Buddhist divinities (and their "phenomenal appearances (suijaku)"- whatever that means), implying that they were lesser beings. Ise (one of the top Shinto shrines) believed it was necessary to chant Buddhist sutras before the kami's altars, so that the kami could attain salvation (which is interesting because it sounds a bit like the way that Jains see the gods as being dependent on the Tirthankars' teachings, since they're otherwise doomed to the cycle of rebirths just like everyone else is). See p.14.
Hardacre remarks that "this situation did not pass entirely without protest, but organised resistance among Shinto priests was virtually unknown before the Meiji Restoration" (p.15). To me, this raises a question: to what extent did Tokugawa Shinto priests actually see this situation as problematic?
Hardacre seems to imply that the average Shinto priest resented being under the thumb of Buddhism and wished that they could operate independently. Obviously Hardacre is an expert on this topic, whereas I've read a grand total of one other book on Shinto (which wasn't primarily focused on Japanese history). So Hardacre's sense of the priests' perspective is going to be much more reliable than mine- I'm just wondering whether the majority of priests necessarily resented the situation. I can imagine a situation where the average Shinto priest saw their lower status as a matter of course (maybe even feeling grateful towards Buddhist temples for being gracious enough to offer their patronage to Shinto shrines). Or maybe you could have a situation where many Shinto priests dreamed of being as high-status as Buddhist priests were- but they mostly aspired to quit their jobs and become Buddhist priests, or something similarly high-status, rather than wishing that their current role could be more prestigious.
I'm having a particularly hard time guessing how Shinto priests felt about the legal requirement that they should have Buddhist funerals. John K. Nelson has given me the impression that Shinto's death taboo renders the concept of Shinto funerals pretty emically problematic (they do happen, but seemingly not that often, even when the deceased was a major patron of a Shinto shrine. See Enduring Identities p.281-2). Under those circumstances, is it possible that most Shinto priests didn't really care what sort of funeral they got (and were happy to delegate the nasty, ritually-impure business of funeral-conducting to someone else)? Again, I'm aware that Hardacre knows more about this topic than I ever will- apart from anything else, there's the fact that greater government support for Shinto would later lead to a brief wave of Shinto priests vandalising Buddhist property, which suggests there must have been some level of latent hostility (see p.63). I just wish she'd go into a bit more detail.
I also have no idea how Buddhist priests felt about Shinto in general- did they see its priests as potential competitors, or as subordinates doing a low-status but necessary job (spiritual janitors, maybe)?
The relationship between Shinto and Buddhism shifted in the Meiji period, due to the influence of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the National Learning school. They had been around for some time, but the upheaveal of the Meiji period resulted in their radical ideas getting attention from politicians. The National Learning writers believed that Japanese culture needed to be purged of all foreign pollution (including Buddhism, since that had originated outside Japan). The arrival of Perry's fleet in 1853 led some of them to decide that the Japanese people needed to be united under a common ideology- this was the only way to strengthen the nation enough to expel the Western barbarians (p.16-17).
I'm somewhat disappointed by this book. I think that's probably a result of mistaken expectations, though. It would probably be a pretty useful book if you were planning on doing a project on Shinto and had a bunch of other sources, but wanted to check you'd covered all the key events during a certain period. Hardacre also explicitly states that she decided to devote minimal attention to the excitingly-controversial WW2 period, since so much has already been written about it in relation to Shinto. That's a reasonable decision, but the end result was a book which felt quite dry and left me feeling like there were lots of things she'd brought up which I would have liked her to go into more detail about (in particular, the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism).
If I'm reading Hardacre right, then here's a potted summary of Shinto's development over the last couple of centuries. It sounds as though Shinto in the mid-nineteenth century was pretty similar to traditional Chinese polytheism (in the sense that it didn't really exist as a unified entity with its own name or institutions, and ordinary people didn't have any issues about mixing and matching it with Buddhism). At least, they sound pretty similar at a village level- I know virtually nothing about how pre-20th century Chinese religion worked at a government level, so I'm not sure how the comparison holds up in that respect.
Hardacre stresses that up until the late nineteenth-century priests who worshipped the kami (Shinto gods) were markedly low-status compared to Buddhist priests. This was apparently made quite clear by the Japanese system of formal ettiquette (for example, Shinto priests got seated lower than Buddhist clerics at village assemblies- p.15). True, the imperial court patronised both Buddhist and Shinto rituals, but in the Tokugawa era the real power (and hence the money to fund rituals) lay with the Shogunate, who sound as though they didn't hold the kami in particularly high esteem (or at any rate, they don't seem to have stressed the relationship between themselves and the kami in order to legitimate their power, as later Japanese governments have done) (p.11).
Most Shinto shrines were located within Buddhist temples, and only staffed parttime. Shinto priests were also all legally required to register with Buddhist temples and receive Buddhist funeral services when they died. Meanwhile, the kami were referred to as the protectors of Buddhist divinities (and their "phenomenal appearances (suijaku)"- whatever that means), implying that they were lesser beings. Ise (one of the top Shinto shrines) believed it was necessary to chant Buddhist sutras before the kami's altars, so that the kami could attain salvation (which is interesting because it sounds a bit like the way that Jains see the gods as being dependent on the Tirthankars' teachings, since they're otherwise doomed to the cycle of rebirths just like everyone else is). See p.14.
Hardacre remarks that "this situation did not pass entirely without protest, but organised resistance among Shinto priests was virtually unknown before the Meiji Restoration" (p.15). To me, this raises a question: to what extent did Tokugawa Shinto priests actually see this situation as problematic?
Hardacre seems to imply that the average Shinto priest resented being under the thumb of Buddhism and wished that they could operate independently. Obviously Hardacre is an expert on this topic, whereas I've read a grand total of one other book on Shinto (which wasn't primarily focused on Japanese history). So Hardacre's sense of the priests' perspective is going to be much more reliable than mine- I'm just wondering whether the majority of priests necessarily resented the situation. I can imagine a situation where the average Shinto priest saw their lower status as a matter of course (maybe even feeling grateful towards Buddhist temples for being gracious enough to offer their patronage to Shinto shrines). Or maybe you could have a situation where many Shinto priests dreamed of being as high-status as Buddhist priests were- but they mostly aspired to quit their jobs and become Buddhist priests, or something similarly high-status, rather than wishing that their current role could be more prestigious.
I'm having a particularly hard time guessing how Shinto priests felt about the legal requirement that they should have Buddhist funerals. John K. Nelson has given me the impression that Shinto's death taboo renders the concept of Shinto funerals pretty emically problematic (they do happen, but seemingly not that often, even when the deceased was a major patron of a Shinto shrine. See Enduring Identities p.281-2). Under those circumstances, is it possible that most Shinto priests didn't really care what sort of funeral they got (and were happy to delegate the nasty, ritually-impure business of funeral-conducting to someone else)? Again, I'm aware that Hardacre knows more about this topic than I ever will- apart from anything else, there's the fact that greater government support for Shinto would later lead to a brief wave of Shinto priests vandalising Buddhist property, which suggests there must have been some level of latent hostility (see p.63). I just wish she'd go into a bit more detail.
I also have no idea how Buddhist priests felt about Shinto in general- did they see its priests as potential competitors, or as subordinates doing a low-status but necessary job (spiritual janitors, maybe)?
The relationship between Shinto and Buddhism shifted in the Meiji period, due to the influence of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the National Learning school. They had been around for some time, but the upheaveal of the Meiji period resulted in their radical ideas getting attention from politicians. The National Learning writers believed that Japanese culture needed to be purged of all foreign pollution (including Buddhism, since that had originated outside Japan). The arrival of Perry's fleet in 1853 led some of them to decide that the Japanese people needed to be united under a common ideology- this was the only way to strengthen the nation enough to expel the Western barbarians (p.16-17).
Phase One of Operation Expel The Western Barbarians seems to have involved a lot of fighting fire with fire. The plan basically seems to have been: let's capture Christianity, clone it, drain off all the theological content, and then shove Shinto into the vacant structure, bending it into whatever shape it needs to be in order to fit (the result looking maybe kind of like
I can't imagine that many religions would survive this process well, but Shinto seems like a particularly stupid choice. The National Learning goal was to end up with a belief system that was very focused on doctrine- specifically, on an integrated set of doctrines under central control, and phrased in such a way as to make them sound militaristic and authoritarian (in the sense of focusing attention on the national government and its Strong Leader). In particular, they were expected to exalt the virtues of Japanese soldiers who had died in war. The priests of this new religion were also expected to adopt a pastoral role, moulding the lives of ordinary Japanese subjects (as well as preaching the standard theology to their congregations).
In other words, Shinto priests were expected to adopt a role which they were almost uniquely ill-suited to. Most of them had very little experience in public speaking, pastoral work, or disseminating doctrine to the public. This was the sort of thing that Buddhist priests specialised in- and Buddhist priests abandoned the Great Promulgation in droves as soon as it became apparent that the endgoal was to render them obsolete (although there were some who stuck around, using their superior preaching experience to subtly insert Buddhist doctrines into campaign sermons and so convert government-backed projects into stealth Buddhist evangelism drives. It didn't help that preachers were expected to fund these programmes themselves- the Buddhist clergy could depend on generous donations from long-standing parishioners, while the smaller Shinto shrines seriously struggled to fund their speakers. See p.45-6).
This is all in addition to the fact that Shinto priests were now suddenly supposed to be actively competing with Buddhists for the right to conduct funerals, and thus were effectively expected to ignore Shinto death taboos in order to perform rituals which many felt were beneath their dignity (although apparently the fact that funerals were a good source of income helped soften the blow for some. See p.47, 35). The general upshot seems to have been that the Campaign got mocked a lot for fermenting religious tension while trying to make Shinto priests do Buddhism's job (p.44). This impression was presumably not improved by bizarre incidents like the one where the Campaign's Great Teaching Institute moved into a building which had previously been a Buddhist temple patronised by the Tokugawa family. For some reason which I'm still struggling to grasp, the installation ceremony involved getting Buddhist priests to do a Shinto ritual while disguised as Shinto priests (using wigs and robes). The Institute itself soon came to be known as the Bureau of Indecision, or the Siesta Office (p.44).
The whole thing seems particularly badly-planned since it doesn't even seem to have made a serious attempt to capitalise on Shinto's existing support base. The Japanese public seems to have viewed Shinto priests as people whose job was performing a set of necessary rituals which required a certain amount of specialist liturgical knowledge. The exact form which these rituals took varied fairly widely from shrine to shrine. If you were really intent on turning Japan into an industrialised authoritarian state, then I'm sure there must have been SOME way to convert these familiar local rituals into a propaganda tool. Instead, Great Promulgation tried to abolish variation in favour of a nationally standardised system which most priests and worshippers seem to have found shallow, dull and confusing.
For example, the new state pantheon emphasised the role of the Three Deities of Creation. Only one of these deities (Amaterasu, in the form of Tenshōdaijin) had any kind of popular following. There was also a kind of official creed, in the form of the Three Great Teachings (which were apparently meant to reassure Buddhist priests that the Campaign had a solid doctrinal basis and hence was worth their participation). The three tenets were:
- patriotism and respect for the gods
- "making clear the principles of the Way of Heaven and the Way of Man"
- reverence for the emperor and obedience towards the imperial court
Which is fair enough, but if you're trying to indoctrinate people en masse, it helps NOT to try using an ideology which has no existing basis in popular thought. This is especially true if you really suck at explaining the ideology to the people who are expected to be propagating it. It doesn't help that the whole philosophical system seems to have boiled down fairly quickly into a list of religious duties for the pious citizen (including exciting responsibilities like paying your taxes, supporting conscription and accepting various aspects of Western culture in the name of "civilisation"). See p.43-4.
As a final added bonus, the Campaign succeeded in pissing off the priests at Izumo shrine (one of the nation's most important Shinto centres) by refusing to include their patron deity in the new core pantheon (as the official god of the underworld). This sparked off a row which split Shinto into factions and ended up encouraging most priests to believe that they should be trying as hard as possible to avoid discussing theology (since it only seemed to cause trouble). In the end, the Great Teaching Institute wussed out of making a formal decision on whether Izumo's god (Ōkuninushi no Mikoto) should be made official lord of the underworld or not. They just announced that Shinto priests above a certain rank were henceforth banned from ministering directly to parishioners. This meant that people like Izumo's top priests were now officially prevented from conducting funerals. The logic was apparently that if they weren't conducting funerals, they'd have no opportunity to make public pronouncements on which deity (if any) was in charge of the underworld. See p.49.
It's apparently incidents like this one which have led some Shinto-supporters to argue that Shinto is not a religion (since they feel that 'religion' implies a focus on doctrine, plus undignified stuff like funerals and prayers for the this-worldly benefit of parishioners). The argument seems to be that Shinto is, by contrast, a system of necessary rituals which transcends mere religion. Priests, it seems, should be striving to limit their performance of mere religious rituals to the bare minimum necessary to secure enough support from parishioners to keep the shrine running and funded (see p.34-5).
This is interesting, because it suggests a worldview very different to the one which drives the tension that sometimes gets described by Western theologians as doctrine vs praxis. It also suggests a big difference from the argument (often voiced by Western humanists) that various East Asian belief systems are not really 'religions' since they don't prioritise god-appeasing rituals clearly enough (thus making them secular philosophies by default). I'll have to see if I can find anything that elaborates further on the issue.
Tuesday 25 November 2008
Religions of Rome: part 4
I'll get back to how much I disagree with Dusek soon, honest- but first, quick post to get the last bit of 'Religions of Rome' out of the way.
The rest of the book is pretty much about elective cults. This a good phrase which I don't think I've specifically seen used anywhere else- basically, an elective cult seems to mean 'a religion in which a substantial number of worshippers have consciously opted-in', rather than a religion which is just the default option for anyone who grows up in a particular culture. So early Christianity was an elective cult, but Judaism was not (not sure whether I'd count medieval European Christianity as an elective cult or not, since for most people choosing to stop participating in worship was presumably not really an option. I guess it was elective in the sense that Jews were theoretically allowed to convert, at least in some nations and periods, and maybe the Reformation made it elective in the sense that people in many nations had to choose which side they were on, denomination-wise. So it's obviously not a completely hard and fast distinction, but it at least articulates that variation exists here, so that's better than nothing).
Quick note on the word 'cult': it's not being used in the pejorative sense of "an organisation which brainwashes its followers", or anything like that. It's just the word which seems to get used by historians and social scientists to refer to groups of worshippers which are a subset of that culture's greater religious system. So I guess that in a pagan Roman context, you could say that pretty much everyone 'believes in' Jupiter to some extent, but not everyone is necessarily part of the 'Jupiter cult' in that they're going out and actively worshipping him by making offerings at his temple, or whatever. I think it's sort of weird that the word 'cult' is used this way in this context when its associations in other contexts seem uniformly negative. I assume it's a holdover from the Bad Old Days of nineteenth-century comparative theology, but I can't think of a more convenient term so I guess we'll just have to stick with the caveats.
Another necessary caveat is that what's 'elective' for some people in a society isn't necessarily 'elective' for everyone- a nice example of how this could work is found on a second century AD inscription honouring an upper-class woman named Agrippinilla (see p. 271). Under her name are the names of 420 devotees to Dionysus, arranged in a system of either 25 or 26 grades of initiation (not sure why there's uncertainty over the number; maybe the inscription is damaged or something). Many of the names sound Oriental (as in, from the bit of the Meditteranean east of Rome, not as in what we'd now call east Asian). This could be interpreted as evidence that Oriental migrants to Rome had established their own Dionysus cult within the city, perhaps in order to preserve some aspects of their home culture.
However, Beard et al. think it's more likely that something else was going on. Agrippinilla's family traced their ancestry to Lesbos, where Dionysus-worship was important. The 420 people on the list were probably neither born in the Orient nor voluntary converts to the cult: it's more likely that they were the family's slaves and ex-slaves, who were subject to compulsory initiation.
Obviously, either explanation would seem to imply that Dionysus-worship wasn't exactly elective in this case (since neither a family cult nor a cult that was the default for a particular ethnic minority sounds very 'elective' to me). But it highlights the fact that you could hypothetically have an upper-class Roman who made a conscious choice to worship some god and then insisted that their family and slaves did so too. I don't know if that actually happened much, but the fact that it's theoretically possible suggests a need to be careful about how we use the terminology.
On the other hand, some cults were apparently more elective than we'd normally assume (and also more elective than the Roman establishment would have liked). Tacitus condemns the wickedness of Jewish prosletytes- people who weren't ethnically Jewish, but who committed themselves to Judaism as much as they were able, going further than those referred to as merely "god-fearing gentiles"). Tacitus felt these people were abandoning their ancestral religion. Later, Cassius Dio records that Domitian executed his cousin and exiled his wife on charges of 'atheism', because both had allegedly "drifted into Judaism". Beard et al. argue that the Roman authorities were more or less ok with the Jews having their own religious practices, but felt very threatened by the possibility of Jews recruiting Roman citizens to their religion (p.276).
Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the authorities took an even dimmer view of Christianity's active attempts to convert people. It sounds as though the type of evangelism seen as most dangerous was not the soapbox-preaching which I've usually imagined Paul engaging in, but the attempts by less prominent Christians to share testimonies with others in private. Non-Christians writer seem to have gotten a mental image of Christians as people who were so low-status as to be almost invisible, allowing them to insinuate themselves into people's households and secretly corrupt the women and children (p.276).
Another interesting thing (p.284) is that the 'alternative' cults seem to have been more reliant on written texts than the standard civic religion of Rome (presumably because adult converts had to be brought up to speed on some relatively specific doctrine or worship practice, whereas one could just pick up the necessary basics of the civic religion from childhood socialisation. Some Roman intellectuals DID spend quite a lot of time trying to write out and study explicit systems of exegesis for the Roman civic religion, but this seems to have been an emically optional aspect of worship which most Romans presumably ignored, if they were even aware of its existence).It also sounds as if most of these sacred texts were for the benefit of priests who were teaching/ initiating the convert, not for the converts themselves (which I guess makes sense in a context where literacy was presumably pretty low).
The obvious examples of sacred texts in this period are the Christian ones (which hadn't yet been collated into the Bible) and Jewish scriptures (especially the Pentateuch, which synagogues read out to worshippers over the course of a year). But there were also other texts which might have played quite different roles in their respective cults- for instance, the Isis cult apparently put great stress on the importance of their sacred texts, which allegedly originated in Egypt. But from the description given it sounds a bit like the basic fact that priests could say "we have sacred writings from Egypt, you know! Written in Egyptian and everything!" might have been more important to the average worshipper than any actual translation or exegesis of the texts (could be wrong about that, though).
Interestingly, Christianity also seems to be the only religion in this area which had a proliferation of different texts, with people actively trying to weed out the 'true' from the 'heretical' accounts (see p.284). They also seem to have been the only people who spent a substantial amount of time trying to systematically argue against the validity of other people's worship (p.310). Mithras-worshippers don't seem likely to have had particularly high opinions of Isis worship, but they don't seem to have felt it was something worth writing polemics about either. Additionally, Christians seem to have been the only elective cult to put substantial effort into building their owncentralised hierarchies of religious authority. Groups like Mithras-worshippers had internal hierarchies in the sense that there were different grades of initiation, but it sounds as though they weren't especially interested in establishing a system where there was one central body which all Mithras cults everywhere accepted as leader (p.304).
The elective cults seem to have often emphasised the issue of the afterlife more than the civic religion did (p.289-90). In The Golden Ass (the best-known example of fiction written from an Isis-worshipper's perspective), Isis tells Apuleius that if he devotes himself to her, she'll extend his life beyond that granted to him by fate, and after death he'll find her shining in the darkness of the underworld. The Mithras cult linked the different stages of initiation to different planets. It seems like they believed that the initiate's soul rose up and away, eventually achieving 'apogenesis' somewhere far from the material world. And obviously Christianity stressed spiritual immortality in a somewhat different sense. But not all the elective cults did this: worshippers of Attis and Jupiter Dolichenus (an aspect of Jupiter with Syrian influences) don't seem to have thought about the afterlife any more than worshippers of the civic religion did.
There's some indication that elective cults gave rise to emically identifiable subcultures. Being part of a distinct religious minority group didn't normally cut you off from the structures of normal Roman society (except in the case of Christianity). However, it DOES seem to have shaped identities in a way that the civic religion didn't (except for natives in the provinces, where the question of one's attitude towards gods with Roman names was a bit more of a self-conscious and politically tense decision- see p.339). If 99% of the people you know sacrifice to a particular collection of gods, then it's hard to define your identity in terms of being yet another person who does that too. People seem to define themselves in opposition to other things- you can't really get excited about defining yourself as a 'Roman pagan' until there are significant numbers of Christians or non-Roman pagans in your immediate social world. Likewise, it sounds as though it was hard to strongly self-identify as 'a worshipper of Jupiter' in pagan Rome, because it doesn't sound like there was a community of Jupiter-worshippers to join (just a disparate group of people who happened to sacrifice to Jupiter without seeing that as a salient part of their identity). But you COULD potentially self-identify as a worshipper of Jupiter Dolichenus and so gain access to a community of other devotees with their own idiosyncratic worship practices.
Having said this, it's unclear to what extent people outside your subculture would notice or care about this aspect of your identity (except again in the case of Christianity, where knowing someone was a Christian presumably had a significant impact on how pagans saw them, at least if the accusations that Christians were unpatriotic and dodgy are any indication). For instance, Isis-worshippers apparently had some sort of special purity rules (p.289), but Beard et al. don't go into details and so it's hard to gauge how much impact this typically had on interactions with non-Isis devotees (did they eat separately from non-devotees? Take days off work for festivals? Wear little bracelets saying 'What Would Sarapis Do?'). They did apparently sometimes have different dress codes than normal Romans, which is probably one reason why you don't see men from the senatorial class joining these cults until after Christianity takes over (after which, things seem to become more a case of "Christianity vs all the different urban paganisms teamed up together", as people stop caring about the fact that they think Magna Mater is inferior to Mithras, and reflect that at least her priests aren't trying to ban animal sacrifices. See p.291, 383).
So, follow-up questions:
-How systematic/organised was Christian evangelism in the early churches? How does that compare to the post-Constantine period? Do we know how much of it was based around public preaching, vs how much of it involved approaching people one-on-one in private?
-If we look at religions besides Christianity which were explicitly founded by one person (e.g. Islam, Buddhism), do their early followers also show a concern with producing a very large number of texts about their founder and then making sure they denounce any 'heretical' versions?
The rest of the book is pretty much about elective cults. This a good phrase which I don't think I've specifically seen used anywhere else- basically, an elective cult seems to mean 'a religion in which a substantial number of worshippers have consciously opted-in', rather than a religion which is just the default option for anyone who grows up in a particular culture. So early Christianity was an elective cult, but Judaism was not (not sure whether I'd count medieval European Christianity as an elective cult or not, since for most people choosing to stop participating in worship was presumably not really an option. I guess it was elective in the sense that Jews were theoretically allowed to convert, at least in some nations and periods, and maybe the Reformation made it elective in the sense that people in many nations had to choose which side they were on, denomination-wise. So it's obviously not a completely hard and fast distinction, but it at least articulates that variation exists here, so that's better than nothing).
Quick note on the word 'cult': it's not being used in the pejorative sense of "an organisation which brainwashes its followers", or anything like that. It's just the word which seems to get used by historians and social scientists to refer to groups of worshippers which are a subset of that culture's greater religious system. So I guess that in a pagan Roman context, you could say that pretty much everyone 'believes in' Jupiter to some extent, but not everyone is necessarily part of the 'Jupiter cult' in that they're going out and actively worshipping him by making offerings at his temple, or whatever. I think it's sort of weird that the word 'cult' is used this way in this context when its associations in other contexts seem uniformly negative. I assume it's a holdover from the Bad Old Days of nineteenth-century comparative theology, but I can't think of a more convenient term so I guess we'll just have to stick with the caveats.
Another necessary caveat is that what's 'elective' for some people in a society isn't necessarily 'elective' for everyone- a nice example of how this could work is found on a second century AD inscription honouring an upper-class woman named Agrippinilla (see p. 271). Under her name are the names of 420 devotees to Dionysus, arranged in a system of either 25 or 26 grades of initiation (not sure why there's uncertainty over the number; maybe the inscription is damaged or something). Many of the names sound Oriental (as in, from the bit of the Meditteranean east of Rome, not as in what we'd now call east Asian). This could be interpreted as evidence that Oriental migrants to Rome had established their own Dionysus cult within the city, perhaps in order to preserve some aspects of their home culture.
However, Beard et al. think it's more likely that something else was going on. Agrippinilla's family traced their ancestry to Lesbos, where Dionysus-worship was important. The 420 people on the list were probably neither born in the Orient nor voluntary converts to the cult: it's more likely that they were the family's slaves and ex-slaves, who were subject to compulsory initiation.
Obviously, either explanation would seem to imply that Dionysus-worship wasn't exactly elective in this case (since neither a family cult nor a cult that was the default for a particular ethnic minority sounds very 'elective' to me). But it highlights the fact that you could hypothetically have an upper-class Roman who made a conscious choice to worship some god and then insisted that their family and slaves did so too. I don't know if that actually happened much, but the fact that it's theoretically possible suggests a need to be careful about how we use the terminology.
On the other hand, some cults were apparently more elective than we'd normally assume (and also more elective than the Roman establishment would have liked). Tacitus condemns the wickedness of Jewish prosletytes- people who weren't ethnically Jewish, but who committed themselves to Judaism as much as they were able, going further than those referred to as merely "god-fearing gentiles"). Tacitus felt these people were abandoning their ancestral religion. Later, Cassius Dio records that Domitian executed his cousin and exiled his wife on charges of 'atheism', because both had allegedly "drifted into Judaism". Beard et al. argue that the Roman authorities were more or less ok with the Jews having their own religious practices, but felt very threatened by the possibility of Jews recruiting Roman citizens to their religion (p.276).
Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the authorities took an even dimmer view of Christianity's active attempts to convert people. It sounds as though the type of evangelism seen as most dangerous was not the soapbox-preaching which I've usually imagined Paul engaging in, but the attempts by less prominent Christians to share testimonies with others in private. Non-Christians writer seem to have gotten a mental image of Christians as people who were so low-status as to be almost invisible, allowing them to insinuate themselves into people's households and secretly corrupt the women and children (p.276).
Another interesting thing (p.284) is that the 'alternative' cults seem to have been more reliant on written texts than the standard civic religion of Rome (presumably because adult converts had to be brought up to speed on some relatively specific doctrine or worship practice, whereas one could just pick up the necessary basics of the civic religion from childhood socialisation. Some Roman intellectuals DID spend quite a lot of time trying to write out and study explicit systems of exegesis for the Roman civic religion, but this seems to have been an emically optional aspect of worship which most Romans presumably ignored, if they were even aware of its existence).It also sounds as if most of these sacred texts were for the benefit of priests who were teaching/ initiating the convert, not for the converts themselves (which I guess makes sense in a context where literacy was presumably pretty low).
The obvious examples of sacred texts in this period are the Christian ones (which hadn't yet been collated into the Bible) and Jewish scriptures (especially the Pentateuch, which synagogues read out to worshippers over the course of a year). But there were also other texts which might have played quite different roles in their respective cults- for instance, the Isis cult apparently put great stress on the importance of their sacred texts, which allegedly originated in Egypt. But from the description given it sounds a bit like the basic fact that priests could say "we have sacred writings from Egypt, you know! Written in Egyptian and everything!" might have been more important to the average worshipper than any actual translation or exegesis of the texts (could be wrong about that, though).
Interestingly, Christianity also seems to be the only religion in this area which had a proliferation of different texts, with people actively trying to weed out the 'true' from the 'heretical' accounts (see p.284). They also seem to have been the only people who spent a substantial amount of time trying to systematically argue against the validity of other people's worship (p.310). Mithras-worshippers don't seem likely to have had particularly high opinions of Isis worship, but they don't seem to have felt it was something worth writing polemics about either. Additionally, Christians seem to have been the only elective cult to put substantial effort into building their owncentralised hierarchies of religious authority. Groups like Mithras-worshippers had internal hierarchies in the sense that there were different grades of initiation, but it sounds as though they weren't especially interested in establishing a system where there was one central body which all Mithras cults everywhere accepted as leader (p.304).
The elective cults seem to have often emphasised the issue of the afterlife more than the civic religion did (p.289-90). In The Golden Ass (the best-known example of fiction written from an Isis-worshipper's perspective), Isis tells Apuleius that if he devotes himself to her, she'll extend his life beyond that granted to him by fate, and after death he'll find her shining in the darkness of the underworld. The Mithras cult linked the different stages of initiation to different planets. It seems like they believed that the initiate's soul rose up and away, eventually achieving 'apogenesis' somewhere far from the material world. And obviously Christianity stressed spiritual immortality in a somewhat different sense. But not all the elective cults did this: worshippers of Attis and Jupiter Dolichenus (an aspect of Jupiter with Syrian influences) don't seem to have thought about the afterlife any more than worshippers of the civic religion did.
There's some indication that elective cults gave rise to emically identifiable subcultures. Being part of a distinct religious minority group didn't normally cut you off from the structures of normal Roman society (except in the case of Christianity). However, it DOES seem to have shaped identities in a way that the civic religion didn't (except for natives in the provinces, where the question of one's attitude towards gods with Roman names was a bit more of a self-conscious and politically tense decision- see p.339). If 99% of the people you know sacrifice to a particular collection of gods, then it's hard to define your identity in terms of being yet another person who does that too. People seem to define themselves in opposition to other things- you can't really get excited about defining yourself as a 'Roman pagan' until there are significant numbers of Christians or non-Roman pagans in your immediate social world. Likewise, it sounds as though it was hard to strongly self-identify as 'a worshipper of Jupiter' in pagan Rome, because it doesn't sound like there was a community of Jupiter-worshippers to join (just a disparate group of people who happened to sacrifice to Jupiter without seeing that as a salient part of their identity). But you COULD potentially self-identify as a worshipper of Jupiter Dolichenus and so gain access to a community of other devotees with their own idiosyncratic worship practices.
Having said this, it's unclear to what extent people outside your subculture would notice or care about this aspect of your identity (except again in the case of Christianity, where knowing someone was a Christian presumably had a significant impact on how pagans saw them, at least if the accusations that Christians were unpatriotic and dodgy are any indication). For instance, Isis-worshippers apparently had some sort of special purity rules (p.289), but Beard et al. don't go into details and so it's hard to gauge how much impact this typically had on interactions with non-Isis devotees (did they eat separately from non-devotees? Take days off work for festivals? Wear little bracelets saying 'What Would Sarapis Do?'). They did apparently sometimes have different dress codes than normal Romans, which is probably one reason why you don't see men from the senatorial class joining these cults until after Christianity takes over (after which, things seem to become more a case of "Christianity vs all the different urban paganisms teamed up together", as people stop caring about the fact that they think Magna Mater is inferior to Mithras, and reflect that at least her priests aren't trying to ban animal sacrifices. See p.291, 383).
It's probably also significant that most elective cults don't seem to have had a distinct emic name for their own followers. For example, Mithras-worship has the names for different initiation grades, but no generic word for 'Mithras-worshipper'. 'Mithraist' is a word created by later scholars with no precise Latin equivalent- except possibly 'sacratus' (devotee) or 'syndexios' ('he who has performed the sacred handshake'). 'Judaeus' (Jew) is a common Latin word, but it was an ethnic descriptor as well as a religious one. The Isis cult sometimes used the word 'Isiacus' to mean 'Isis-devotee', but it doesn't seem to have been a very common word (p.307).
Christianity was clearly unusually exclusive, in that so many prominent Christians argued that one could not be a Christian AND a worshipper of other cults (we have no evidence of the other cults doing anything similar). However, we should clarify that there were probably at least some Christians who were less hardline on this issue than the famous Christians were (e.g. Christians who aren't famous martyrs because they decided to go along with imperial sacrifices and hope God didn't mind). There are also the Naassenes, who explicitly argued that the Magna Mater cult was actually worshipping the Christian God, and so it was ok for Christians to go to their rituals (although the Naassenes didn't castrate themselves as Magna Mater's priests did). They seem to have been declared heretical pretty quickly (p.311).
(Incidentally, wiki notes something else interesting about them:
"The Naassenes (from the Hebrew word na'asch meaning snake) were a gnostic Ophite sect from around 100 A.D. The Naassenes, the Sethians, the Mandaeans, the Perates, and the Borborites are the known Ophite sects. Naassenes worshipped the serpent of Genesis as the bestower of knowledge. The Ophites' point of view on the biblic perception is this: The serpent is the hero, the one that calls himself God is called Yaldabaoth, Samael, or Saklas. Yaldabaoth was seen as the creator of the material world, but not as God, but as the will of God.[citation needed] Samael can be compared to the angel of death or the Devil. Saklas means 'fool' in the ancient language of Aramaic."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naassenes )
Final interesting thing: we've apparently found copies of a message that the Roman governor of Egypt circulated, informing the province that the Emperor Claudius did NOT want the Alexandrians to worship him as a god. This message was complicated by the fact that it was attached to a covering edict referring to him as "our god Caesar". Not sure what the precise word was, though (presumably this was all written in Latin?) See p.313. Similarly, one high-ranking Roman apparently wrote approvingly that at least one German tribe worshipped Augustus (before his death), and that their leader had crossed the Elbe in a canoe so that he could touch Augustus' heir Tiberius, who they also saw as divine (p.352).
Sadly, Beard et al. don't really get into the topic of pagan monotheism in the classical period. They briefly mention that some Isis-devotees explicitly argued that Isis was the same being as the goddesses worshipped under names such as 'Venus', 'Minerva' and 'Magna Mater' (p.281). I guess I'll have to go chase this up properly at some point.So, follow-up questions:
-How systematic/organised was Christian evangelism in the early churches? How does that compare to the post-Constantine period? Do we know how much of it was based around public preaching, vs how much of it involved approaching people one-on-one in private?
-If we look at religions besides Christianity which were explicitly founded by one person (e.g. Islam, Buddhism), do their early followers also show a concern with producing a very large number of texts about their founder and then making sure they denounce any 'heretical' versions?
-Early Christianity was distinctive in several ways. It was exclusive (it banned its members from joining other cults). It was extremely evangelistic, in that it sought to systematically convert the world. It was very concerned with writing texts for worshippers to learn from, and then vetting these texts for possible error. It was also very concerned with writing texts to persuade others to convert (apologetics and polemics against other faiths). And it was unusually centralised. To what extent are all these traits linked? For example, was it centralised BECAUSE Christians felt they needed a central authority to make decisions on which texts were heretical?
-If we look at people following religions which DON'T stress the idea of a happy afterlife for devotees, how do they tend to respond when they encounter members of religions which do? Assuming they don't convert, do they tend to dismiss the idea as wishful thinking, or just not as anything worth thinking about too much, or what? In the long term, does regular contact (or competition) with religions that promise a happy afterlife tend to make other religions develop a Heaven-concept of their own?Tuesday 11 November 2008
'Sociobiology Sanitised' by Val Dusek
I've finished Hardacre's Shinto and the State, and I'd meant to stick a review up today. But then someone forwarded me a link to this article and consequently made me angry enough to put the kami on hold. So congratulations, Val Dusek, I guess you're the lucky guy whose work I'm going to be regurgitating today.
My biggest problem with 'Sociobiology Sanitised' is that it violatesHume's guillotine, aka the is-ought distinction, aka "not losing sight of the distinction between scientific descriptions of what is currently the case and speculations about what implications this might hypothetically have for human conduct, ethics and the Meaning of Life.)
For some reason, this only seems to get violated in relation to studies of human behaviour and/or evolution. For instance, I don't recall ever hearing that announcements of the discovery of the Ebola virus were immediately met by protests that Western-trained virologists were trying to maliciously portray Sudanese and Congolese people as filthy and disease-ridden. If a scientist predicts that Vesuvius could erupt soon, people don't write long essays about how this is the same as saying volcanic eruptions are 'natural', which is the same thing as saying that anyone living on the slopes of Vesuvius now should just stay where they are, suck it up and quit whining about the risk of possible incineration. Why, then, do people so often confuse the two when it comes to human genetics?
Admittedly it's unfair to lay all the blame on Dusek in this case- I'm guessing that all or most of the people he cites on both sides have committed the same fallacy at least once (even Pinker seems to be guilty of it- for example, at one point in The Blank Slate he seems to be saying that anyone who stresses the importance of culture is basically a pessimist who thinks we're all automatons. I'll try to find the page reference, but it kind of jumps out because throughout most of that book Pinker gives the impression of being someone who's got a pretty good grasp of the role culture plays in the human species). I also realise that Dusek is probably aware that he's mixing science and politics in this discussion, and doesn't consider this to be a weakness so much as a sign of integrity. I'm not sure that I can currently articulate why I think this is a bad idea, so I think the plan is to critique his essay point-by-point and then see if I can come up with anything more convincing than "I think he's wrong".
I should also state that I'm going to be skimming over a couple of bits of Dusek's essay, on the grounds that I know approximately nothing about neuroscience or the Minnesota twin studies. Feel free to assume that this fatally undermines my position if this will make you feel happier about the whole thing.
Dusek begins by informing us that he was present at the famous incident in which protestors hurled water at sociobiologist E.O. Wilson while he was attempting to give a speech at a convention, apparently because they believed that sociobiology is inherently racist. The Blank Slate gives a description of this, along with several other incidents where people have done their best to prevent various biologists speaking in public (on the grounds that they might say something evil). Personally, I found this rather worrying (from a censorship perspective, if nothing else).
Dusek argues that the people repeating accounts of this incident neglect to report that Wilson "responded by saying to the audience that he felt like he had been speared by an aborigine". I've certainly never heard that detail before, and when I've finished bitching on the internet I should probably go and see if I can find anywhere else that mentions it. Having said that, I don't think this really excuses the fact that they threw water on him in the first place. Unless it was magic water which makes people reveal their secret racist thoughts when you throw it on them. That would be so cool. If I had magic racism-revealing water then you can bet that I'd be throwing it on people, like, ALL THE TIME. I'd be breaking into conferences on topics I knew nothing about, just so I could throw it at the keynote speaker and see if they responded with an unpleasant slur about my genetic ancestry. I'd be a vigilante, just like Batman, except I wouldn't live in a cave or own cars or harpoon guns. It would still be pretty sweet, though.
Where was I? Oh. Yes. Racism is wrong, kids. Don't let the misguided ramblings of a postgrad with a questionable sense of humour persuade you otherwise.
Dusek goes on to address the question of whether there's any difference between 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary psychology' except that the latter term is currently more fashionable. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major differences, but then I'm not an evolutionary psychologist and God knows that academics will fight to the bitter end to defend their right to self-define disciplinary boundaries that are frequently invisible to people outside the discipline in question, so I can't really offer an opinion on this one. However, I thought this statement of Dusek's was somewhat odd:
viciously labelled as 'Christian' by the mainstream media. Of course, Dusek has to go ahead and ruin this daydream by stating that:
My biggest problem with 'Sociobiology Sanitised' is that it violates
For some reason, this only seems to get violated in relation to studies of human behaviour and/or evolution. For instance, I don't recall ever hearing that announcements of the discovery of the Ebola virus were immediately met by protests that Western-trained virologists were trying to maliciously portray Sudanese and Congolese people as filthy and disease-ridden. If a scientist predicts that Vesuvius could erupt soon, people don't write long essays about how this is the same as saying volcanic eruptions are 'natural', which is the same thing as saying that anyone living on the slopes of Vesuvius now should just stay where they are, suck it up and quit whining about the risk of possible incineration. Why, then, do people so often confuse the two when it comes to human genetics?
Admittedly it's unfair to lay all the blame on Dusek in this case- I'm guessing that all or most of the people he cites on both sides have committed the same fallacy at least once (even Pinker seems to be guilty of it- for example, at one point in The Blank Slate he seems to be saying that anyone who stresses the importance of culture is basically a pessimist who thinks we're all automatons. I'll try to find the page reference, but it kind of jumps out because throughout most of that book Pinker gives the impression of being someone who's got a pretty good grasp of the role culture plays in the human species). I also realise that Dusek is probably aware that he's mixing science and politics in this discussion, and doesn't consider this to be a weakness so much as a sign of integrity. I'm not sure that I can currently articulate why I think this is a bad idea, so I think the plan is to critique his essay point-by-point and then see if I can come up with anything more convincing than "I think he's wrong".
I should also state that I'm going to be skimming over a couple of bits of Dusek's essay, on the grounds that I know approximately nothing about neuroscience or the Minnesota twin studies. Feel free to assume that this fatally undermines my position if this will make you feel happier about the whole thing.
Dusek begins by informing us that he was present at the famous incident in which protestors hurled water at sociobiologist E.O. Wilson while he was attempting to give a speech at a convention, apparently because they believed that sociobiology is inherently racist. The Blank Slate gives a description of this, along with several other incidents where people have done their best to prevent various biologists speaking in public (on the grounds that they might say something evil). Personally, I found this rather worrying (from a censorship perspective, if nothing else).
Dusek argues that the people repeating accounts of this incident neglect to report that Wilson "responded by saying to the audience that he felt like he had been speared by an aborigine". I've certainly never heard that detail before, and when I've finished bitching on the internet I should probably go and see if I can find anywhere else that mentions it. Having said that, I don't think this really excuses the fact that they threw water on him in the first place. Unless it was magic water which makes people reveal their secret racist thoughts when you throw it on them. That would be so cool. If I had magic racism-revealing water then you can bet that I'd be throwing it on people, like, ALL THE TIME. I'd be breaking into conferences on topics I knew nothing about, just so I could throw it at the keynote speaker and see if they responded with an unpleasant slur about my genetic ancestry. I'd be a vigilante, just like Batman, except I wouldn't live in a cave or own cars or harpoon guns. It would still be pretty sweet, though.
Where was I? Oh. Yes. Racism is wrong, kids. Don't let the misguided ramblings of a postgrad with a questionable sense of humour persuade you otherwise.
Dusek goes on to address the question of whether there's any difference between 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary psychology' except that the latter term is currently more fashionable. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major differences, but then I'm not an evolutionary psychologist and God knows that academics will fight to the bitter end to defend their right to self-define disciplinary boundaries that are frequently invisible to people outside the discipline in question, so I can't really offer an opinion on this one. However, I thought this statement of Dusek's was somewhat odd:
"I believe part of the difference [between sociobiology and EP] is a tactical retreat from some of the more belligerently ideological and sexist pronouncements of the past which attracted criticism and condemnation."Call me a cynic, but I can't help but feel like this is one of those irregular verbs. You know- "I respond well to peer input; you pay attention to constructive criticism, he just enacts a tactical retreat from the belligerent sexism of the past." Where I come from, if a group of scientists start backing down from a position on the grounds that it's chauvinist, feminists usually see that as a reason to celebrate. It seems a bit weird to watch people abandoning an argument which you find offensive, and then use that as an argument that this proves nothing except that they're evil hypocrites.
"Wilson has more recently allied himself with the fellow Harvard professor Thernstrom in forming an organization to dismiss and denigrate (without any actual investigation) the academic quality of Womens Studies and Ethnic Studies programs. Dawkins, on the other hand, does not make explicit social policy pronouncements."Sorry- I just want to pause a moment to contemplate the idea of a world where Richard Dawkins steers well clear of debates on social policy. The essay was written back in 1998, when atheists were quiet and respectful folk, beer was a shilling a bottle, and we all let children play in the street without worrying that they would be
"Dawkins' work is ideology in an even stronger sense that E. O. Wilson's precisely because none of it is explicit. Dawkins can present himself as the pure scientist in contrast to Gould and Lewontin precisely by feigning political unconsciousness and indifference."
This comment is an example of a sentiment which seems to come up quite often in a certain kind of humanities and social science theorising. I think the reason why you see this in those fields is because they're disciplines which spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that words have power. This seems to lead some people to the conclusion that attempts to communicate effectively are inherently oppressive, since they basically involve tricking or seducing your listeners into doing what you want. Some people who hold this opinion seem to make their peace with it (I get the impression that Foucault was one of them, although I haven't read enough of his original material to be sure). Others just seem to reach the conclusion that the only way to fight oppression is to find someone who looks like they endorse an influential point of view, and then spend your time incessantly telling them to shut up and go away. It's not enough just to critique the speaker every time they say something you disagree with; for all we know, even their apparently innocuous comments could actually be subliminal rhetoric designed to spread the tyranny; therefore "shut up and go away" is the only safe counterargument.
I say these people 'seem to' believe this, because I can only assume that this isn't the way it looks from an emic-insider perspective to this academic subculture. Unfortunately my empathy detector is failing to come up with alternative interpretation of how people like Dusek perceive the issue; if anyone could explain it more convincingly, I'd much appreciate it.
Since this post has gone on for more than long enough already, I think I'll just cut it off there. Tune in for more diatribe tomorrow.
Thursday 6 November 2008
Fun with Bestiaries!
Bunny the Landlord is a medieval studies postgrad, and she has found a thing of wonder.
"The dove is associated with Christ and the Holy Spirit. God sent his spirit in the form of a dove to gather mankind into his church. As there are many colours of doves, so there were many ways of speaking through the laws and the prophets. The meanings of the colours of the dove are:
- red- the predominant colour because Christ redeemed man with his blood
- speckled- the diversity of the twelve prophets
- gold- the three boys who refused to worship the golden image
- air coloured- the prophet Elisha, who was taken up into the air
- black- obscure sermons
- ash coloured- Jonah, who preached wearing a hair shirt and ashes
- stephanite- Stephen, the first martyr
- white- John the Baptist and the cleansing of baptism."
There are several things here that make intriguingly little sense. What does "obscure sermons" mean in this context? Where on earth did he get the idea that doves could be red, black or gold, let alone 'stephanite'? (I wikied it-
But I think the most bizarre point on the list is the air-coloured dove. Like, a completely translucent one? Or did the writer in question just live in Victorian London?
And then there's the quote from Bartholomaeus Anglicus:
"The culvour [dove] is forgetful. And therefore when the birds are borne away, she forgetteth her harm and damage, and leaveth not therefore to build and breed in the same place. Also she is nicely curious. For sitting on a tree, she beholdeth and looketh all about toward what part she will fly, and bendeth her neck all about as it were taking avisement. But oft while she taketh avisement of flight, ere she taketh her flight, an arrow flieth through her body, and therefore she faileth of her purpose, as Gregory saith."
(PS- The Biologist Housemate says that he's calling dibs on the dissertation title
Wednesday 5 November 2008
Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' part 2: magicians, prophets and priests
The main reason I wanted to read this book (apart from wanting the opportunity to bitch about it on the internet) is Weber's description of a framework for categorising different kinds of religious specialist.
Systems of etic categorisation are always going to be a bit problematic in the social sciences. It doesn't take a genius to see that even in the best taxonomies there are going to be intermediate cases that don't quite fit into any category. This means that some people are inevitably going to start questioning the point of categorising the thing at all.
Every now and again you get arguments to the effect that human social constructs are inherently unclassifiable. This position generally seems to be adopted after someone has the startling revelation that People Are Complicated (this is a scientific fact). Maybe this is just me being anal-retentive and Teacherite at things, but I say suck it up, social sciences. Biologists seem able to cope with the level of complexity that comes with bog-standard taxonomy (God help them if the issue in question involves asexual species or anything at all to do with conservation). As long as people make an effort to flag up the fact that there are going to be ambiguous cases, a flawed typology is often going to be more useful than no typology at all, at least when it comes to the initial job of getting our heads around the problem.
Notice that I said 'often'.
I'm in two minds about Weber's framework. His main dichotomy is between priests and magicians, and as such is basically similar to the priest vs shaman distinction which you see in a bunch of other people's work*. There's also the 'prophet' category, which doesn't seem to have received much attention in anthropology (maybe because they seem to be world-changing figures who only come along every once in a while, and ethnography tends to be better suited to studying more routine aspects of religion).
This is Weber's framework, as I understand it:
Priests: people who are permanently employed by a large stable organisation which they are expected to support. They have professional qualifications which are earned by studying to become an expert on specialist knowledge (e.g. formal theology). They are also supposed to be experts on "the practical problems involved in the cure of souls" (p.30), which means general pastoral care and also whatever rituals are deemed necessary for salvation (e.g. confession, baptism, etc). In addition, priests worship gods (i.e. they adopt a relatively humble attitude towards supernatural beings which are seen as being worthy of respect). Oh, Weber also labels their training as "rational" (p.29)- as I said in last post, I have no idea what we're meant to assume that word means in this context.
Magicians: are generally "self-employed" (p.29), and tend to act alone in rituals which are not held according to any fixed schedule. Their qualifications are based entirely on personal charisma, which is made manifest through the ability to perform various types of magic. They're emically deemed to gain this charisma via a ritual rebirth plus training in "purely empirical lore" (p.29). Weber doesn't mention if he thinks they do pastoral/salvation work. They focus not on worshipping gods, but on coercing and charming demons. And yes, Weber has decided that the way they operate is in some sense "irrational" (p.29).
Prophets: a person who makes it their personal mission to spearhead a campaign for religious change (whether this is subsequently viewed as an attempt to start a new religion, or just to revitalise an old one). They may focus on preaching and giving advice on how people can live better lives (in which case Weber calls them 'ethical prophets'), or on just making themselves a paragon who others can try to emulate (in which case he calls them 'exemplary prophets'). They generally don't have steady jobs or live in a stable household; they may travel around a lot, beg or do a series of temporary jobs.
'Magicians' seem to be the least exclusive category in Weber's eyes. Priests may do magic (p.28)- e.g., given what Weber has to say about magicians and demon-coercion, I'd guess that Catholic exorcisms would count as 'magic' under this system. Successful prophets almost always do magic, or at least have magic attributed to them: they have so much charisma that people would tend to present them as BEST MAGICIAN EVER even if they tried to deny the title. I suspect Weber felt that Christ's resurrection may fall into this category (p.78).
I'm sure that there are going to be at least some things that don't fit into any of these categories, and the specific words 'priest' and 'magician' are probably unhelpful here (especially since, as is often the case with these issues, we start running into serious theoretical difficulties when we try to work the modern-day Pagan movement into the model). The question is, does this describe any sort of general tendency? For example, do people who have fulltime jobs as religious specialists have a greater tendency to present their supernatural patrons as uncoercable?
It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to systematically test that idea- sadly, since Weber isn't phrasing his ideas in terms of testable hypotheses, it sounds like it would be quite a lot of work.
*For those who care, I've so far seen a binary priest/shaman typology come up in: W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Zogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)
Victor Turner's essay 'Religious Specialists' (originally 1972, but republished in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural: fourth edition, 1997)
Morton Klass' Ordered Universes (1995)
A somewhat similar typology is proposed in Fredrik Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer' (1990, Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653). This article went on to inspire Harvey Whitehouse to write extensively on the same topic; I think his most persuasive article on the issue is still 'Memorable Religion' (1992, Man, 27, 3, pp.777-797), but if you don't have access to that journal then Arguments and Icons is probably the next best bet.
Systems of etic categorisation are always going to be a bit problematic in the social sciences. It doesn't take a genius to see that even in the best taxonomies there are going to be intermediate cases that don't quite fit into any category. This means that some people are inevitably going to start questioning the point of categorising the thing at all.
Every now and again you get arguments to the effect that human social constructs are inherently unclassifiable. This position generally seems to be adopted after someone has the startling revelation that People Are Complicated (this is a scientific fact). Maybe this is just me being anal-retentive and Teacherite at things, but I say suck it up, social sciences. Biologists seem able to cope with the level of complexity that comes with bog-standard taxonomy (God help them if the issue in question involves asexual species or anything at all to do with conservation). As long as people make an effort to flag up the fact that there are going to be ambiguous cases, a flawed typology is often going to be more useful than no typology at all, at least when it comes to the initial job of getting our heads around the problem.
Notice that I said 'often'.
I'm in two minds about Weber's framework. His main dichotomy is between priests and magicians, and as such is basically similar to the priest vs shaman distinction which you see in a bunch of other people's work*. There's also the 'prophet' category, which doesn't seem to have received much attention in anthropology (maybe because they seem to be world-changing figures who only come along every once in a while, and ethnography tends to be better suited to studying more routine aspects of religion).
This is Weber's framework, as I understand it:
Priests: people who are permanently employed by a large stable organisation which they are expected to support. They have professional qualifications which are earned by studying to become an expert on specialist knowledge (e.g. formal theology). They are also supposed to be experts on "the practical problems involved in the cure of souls" (p.30), which means general pastoral care and also whatever rituals are deemed necessary for salvation (e.g. confession, baptism, etc). In addition, priests worship gods (i.e. they adopt a relatively humble attitude towards supernatural beings which are seen as being worthy of respect). Oh, Weber also labels their training as "rational" (p.29)- as I said in last post, I have no idea what we're meant to assume that word means in this context.
Magicians: are generally "self-employed" (p.29), and tend to act alone in rituals which are not held according to any fixed schedule. Their qualifications are based entirely on personal charisma, which is made manifest through the ability to perform various types of magic. They're emically deemed to gain this charisma via a ritual rebirth plus training in "purely empirical lore" (p.29). Weber doesn't mention if he thinks they do pastoral/salvation work. They focus not on worshipping gods, but on coercing and charming demons. And yes, Weber has decided that the way they operate is in some sense "irrational" (p.29).
Prophets: a person who makes it their personal mission to spearhead a campaign for religious change (whether this is subsequently viewed as an attempt to start a new religion, or just to revitalise an old one). They may focus on preaching and giving advice on how people can live better lives (in which case Weber calls them 'ethical prophets'), or on just making themselves a paragon who others can try to emulate (in which case he calls them 'exemplary prophets'). They generally don't have steady jobs or live in a stable household; they may travel around a lot, beg or do a series of temporary jobs.
'Magicians' seem to be the least exclusive category in Weber's eyes. Priests may do magic (p.28)- e.g., given what Weber has to say about magicians and demon-coercion, I'd guess that Catholic exorcisms would count as 'magic' under this system. Successful prophets almost always do magic, or at least have magic attributed to them: they have so much charisma that people would tend to present them as BEST MAGICIAN EVER even if they tried to deny the title. I suspect Weber felt that Christ's resurrection may fall into this category (p.78).
I'm sure that there are going to be at least some things that don't fit into any of these categories, and the specific words 'priest' and 'magician' are probably unhelpful here (especially since, as is often the case with these issues, we start running into serious theoretical difficulties when we try to work the modern-day Pagan movement into the model). The question is, does this describe any sort of general tendency? For example, do people who have fulltime jobs as religious specialists have a greater tendency to present their supernatural patrons as uncoercable?
It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to systematically test that idea- sadly, since Weber isn't phrasing his ideas in terms of testable hypotheses, it sounds like it would be quite a lot of work.
*For those who care, I've so far seen a binary priest/shaman typology come up in: W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Zogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)
Victor Turner's essay 'Religious Specialists' (originally 1972, but republished in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural: fourth edition, 1997)
Morton Klass' Ordered Universes (1995)
A somewhat similar typology is proposed in Fredrik Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer' (1990, Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653). This article went on to inspire Harvey Whitehouse to write extensively on the same topic; I think his most persuasive article on the issue is still 'Memorable Religion' (1992, Man, 27, 3, pp.777-797), but if you don't have access to that journal then Arguments and Icons is probably the next best bet.
Monday 3 November 2008
Reading: Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' (Ch 1-3)
Link to online version of the book, although the version I'm actually reading (and referencing) is the 1965 Methuen & Co. edition, translated by Ephraim Fischoff from the German fourth ed.
This one is a bit disappointing so far. Maybe this is anthropologist-spite surfacing again, but I can't help but make unflattering comparisons with Malinowski's Argonauts. The latter is a book which turned out to feel a lot less dated than I expected it to, in that large parts of it read very much like an ethnography which could have been written decades later (admittedly this is punctuated by passages which reveal their age by stopping to explain that ethnography is an entirely new and untested method which just might pay off if we give it a chance. Or by casually noting that Dobu is a great island because the natives look like funny little gnomes and make excellent servants. See p.41 of the 2002 Routledge edition). After a while, the unexpectedly contemporary feel of much of Argonauts starts to get a bit depressing- has standard ethnographic methodology has really progressed so little since the 1920s? By now, shouldn't we be sneering at his silly primitive ur-ethnography while we fly around in our jetpacks and drink violently fluorescent cocktails on our top-secret communist moonbase?
I've never forgiven 1960s sci-fi for raising my hopes like that, so in today's spirit of frustrated academic Oedipalism I guess I'll blame that on Malinowski too. Bloody Malinowski. It's your fault that we're not all wearing improbably orange latex jumpsuits and letting our children be raised on robot kibbutzes.
Anyway, I'd somehow acquired the impression that The Sociology of Religion featured a similar kind of depressingly cutting-edge-sounding insight, of the kind which makes you want to curl up on the sofa and despair at later social scientists' sad inability to properly bash Daddy's head in, Primal Horde-style, so that the rest of us would have at least some chance of getting on with the important business of trading women and developing more interesting neuroses. Oh, there were giants then.
Sadly, Weber has so far come across less like Malinowski and more like James Frazer. Perhaps that's inevitable, given both authors' ambitious goal of describing the entire human species without letting any trifling distractions getting in the way (such as empirical research, or citations). It doesn't help that he seems to be upholding a linear evolutionist view of religion (i.e. one of the ones where the author starts from the assumption that primitive societies start all start off with a particular view of the supernatural, such as animism/magic/naturalism, and then painstakingly work their way up to something more sophisticated, like monotheism/atheism/social science funding. This is not a paradigm which I am particularly sympathetic to, especially since it now means that any use of the word 'evolution' in a social sciences paper needs to be surrounded by a bodyguard of anxious caveats in riot gear (with radios and teargas to show they mean business).
Furthermore, he persists in using the R-word, which has been a bad idea in the social sciences since the Rationality Wars of a few decades ago (I keep meaning to go and check whether anyone actually won those; currently my impression is that an impasse was reached and so everyone declared a ceasefire in order to creep back to their respective departments and lick their wounds. It looks as though one of the key terms in the subsequent peace treaty was that no one should ever use the word 'rationality' in academic discourse, except when shouting at economists). Weber pre-dates that particular academic conflict by several decades, which may be why he doesn't seem inclined to define what he means by the R-word. On p.1, he seems to give the impression that he's going to be speaking in terms of what we'd now call bounded rationality:
"Furthermore, religious or magically motivated behaviour is relatively rational behaviour, especially in its earliest manifestations. It follows rules of experience, though it is not necessarily action in accordance with a means-end schema. [...] Thus religious or magical behaviour or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic."
It's a bit of a simplistic statement, but I'm reasonably happy with what he's saying. However, he goes on to use the word in ways which don't seem to back this up (for example, he refers to the "incredible irrationality" of certain taboos, without elaborating (p.38)). In some cases, we can speculate that he's drawing on his 'rationalisation' argument, so that by 'irrational' he actually means 'bad for capitalism' (e.g. when he refers to the 'irrationality' of Chinese funeral rites on p.6). It's still irritating, though.
This means that for the most part, this feels less like a reliable theoretical framework, and more like an interesting grab-bag of eccentric intellectual arguments, based on data which may or may not be accurate. Some random questionable highlights include Weber's arguments that:
- funeral rites and belief in ghosts developed because Early Man was scared of corpses. (p.6)
- concepts such as 'fire god' are a relatively recent innovation; originally fire itself was worshipped as a god. Allegedly we find this view still present in the Vedas; I'd be interested in knowing if there's anything to that claim. (p.10)
- the major reason why religions prohibit adultery is that in ancient times it raised the possibility that the male-line ancestors of the clan might start receiving sacrifices from someone who wasn't related to them by blood. (p.15)
- when a religious system evolves to accord greater precedence to one god over the others, the god who is so exalted is likely to be a sky or star god (apparently because these deities usually "evinced the greatest regularity in their behaviour").(p.21)
- "almost everywhere a beginning was made toward some form of consistent monotheism", but in most cases this was stymied by the fact that the polytheist priests wanted to cling to power, while the commoners clung to the idea of gods who had distinct and recognisable spheres, could be represented iconographically, and were weak enough to be coerced by magic. (p.24)
- in Athens, a man who had no household god could not hold public office. Sadly he doesn't elaborate as to exactly what implications this had in practice. (p.18)
- Weber argues that there's a tension between the fact that, on the one hand, a low-caste Hindu sees his own vocation as a sacred duty entrusted to him by the gods themselves- but on the other hand, their reward for doing it properly is to be reborn as a higher-caste person. I know very little about caste, so I have no idea if this is in any way accurate. (p.42)
- there's a brief mention of the fact that some gods are emically held to be bound by some sort of impersonal super-divine force, like 'fate' in the case of the Greeks (p.36). This is interesting, because I seem to remember Laidlaw saying something similar about Jain gods and karma in Riches and Renunciation. I suppose you might also be able to draw a parallel ith variants of Christian theology which argue that God would have liked to just automatically forgive humanity, but regrettably couldn't do this except by way of the crucifixion (admittedly I can't think of any sources which explicitly spell out this view, although it's what CS Lewis' description of Narnian Old Magic seems to be driving at).
Weber also brings up the evocation rituals which I mentioned in my trawl through Religions of Rome. He mentions that it was attempted by some dude named Camillus in relation to the Veji. He then adds that:
"The gods of one group might be stolen or otherwise acquired by another group, but this does not always accrue to the benefit of the latter, as in the case of the ark of the Israelites which brought plagues upon the Philistine conquerors."
I'm unconvinced that it's actually a sensible idea to consider the Philistine example the same thing as the Roman evocations, but it's an interesting idea.
Also contained in this section is the first mention of Weber's typology of different kinds of charismatic leader, which leads into a discussion of priests, prophets, magicians, etc. This is more immediately relevant to me, for reasons that take a certain amount of explanation. I'll try to discuss that properly in another post.
Wednesday 29 October 2008
Religions of Rome, part 3: restrictions on religious activity
Chapter 5 is particularly nice, because it outlines the limits of what Romans were prepared to tolerate in their religion. Emic attempts to do this are generally quite illuminating, particularly if the boundary ends up somewhere very different to where the reader would personally draw it. In this case, it's also interesting because it feeds into the debate on orthodoxy vs orthopraxy- that is, the debate over the extent to which different religions stress the importance of 'right belief' and 'right practice'. This is an important one, because if it turns out that a religion emically stresses correct observance of rituals much more than it stresses adherence to a specific creed or belief system, then expecting adherents to consistently agree on every aspect of their theology is only going to lead to tears (or, more specifically, to people getting accused of hypocrisy or stupidity for failing to pay attention to an aspect of their culture which they may not see as all that relevant to their everyday lives).
I'm not going to go into a full analysis of Harvey Whitehouse's modes framework now (I spent half an MA dissertation doing that, so it would get more longwinded than usual). Suffice to say that if you place a high importance on people memorising an intricate set of doctrines and then repeating them consistently (with deviations being flagged up and punished as heresy), then it helps if everyone involved is fully literate. Literacy (including printing) arguably makes consistency easier and deviations easier to spot. However, this clearly isn't the same thing as saying that literacy and stress on orthodoxy are invariably found together, so Classical Rome makes an interesting case study. Here's a society where upper-class men were pretty highly literate, but you don't seem to see very much emic stress on orthodoxy. That being the case, what kind of attitudes did they hold towards religious practice?
Beard et al. kick the chapter off with a welcome announcement:
This is followed up by a really nice emic quote:
I'm not going to go into a full analysis of Harvey Whitehouse's modes framework now (I spent half an MA dissertation doing that, so it would get more longwinded than usual). Suffice to say that if you place a high importance on people memorising an intricate set of doctrines and then repeating them consistently (with deviations being flagged up and punished as heresy), then it helps if everyone involved is fully literate. Literacy (including printing) arguably makes consistency easier and deviations easier to spot. However, this clearly isn't the same thing as saying that literacy and stress on orthodoxy are invariably found together, so Classical Rome makes an interesting case study. Here's a society where upper-class men were pretty highly literate, but you don't seem to see very much emic stress on orthodoxy. That being the case, what kind of attitudes did they hold towards religious practice?
Beard et al. kick the chapter off with a welcome announcement:
"We shall stress too, in this chapter in particular, that traditional Roman paganism was not, as has been claimed, "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth" [cf R.MacMullen's Paganism in the Roman Empire]. The fact that there was a plurality of gods did not necessarily mean that religion had no limits, or that (apart, of course, from Christianity), 'anything went'. Polytheistic systems can be just as resistant as monotheism to innovation and foreign influence. And, although Roman religion was marked throughout its history by religious innovation of all kinds, there were, at the same time, clear and repeated signs of concern about the influence of foreign cults; there were also specifically 'religious crimes', categories of religious transgression liable (as in the case of the unchastity of Vestals) to public punishment. Rome was never a religious 'free for all'." (p.212)
This is followed up by a really nice emic quote:
"If you truly desire to become immortal, do as I advise. In addition, not only must you yourself worship the divine everywhere and in every way according to ancestral custom and force everyone else to honour it; but you must also reject and punish those who make some foreign innovation in its worship, not only for the sake of the gods (since anyone despising them will not honour anyone else) but also because such people who introduce new deities persuade many people to change their ways, leading to conspiracies, revolts and factions, which are most unsuitable for a monarchy. So you must not allow anyone to be godless or a sorceror. The art of divination is necessary, and you should certainly appoint some as diviners from entrails and birds, to whom those wishing a consultation will go. But magicians should be absolutely banned, for such people, by speaking far more lies than truths, often cause many disturbances." -3rd century writer Cassius Dio (book LII.36.1-3). He presents this as advice given to Augustus by his friend Maecenas.
Later, the discussion of Christian persecutions provides a good example of a clash between two ways of conceptualising the doctrine/praxis issue. Pliny apparently wrote to Emperor Trajan for guidance on whether merely professing Christianity was in itself a crime, or whether the person in question had to have committed "associated criminal actions" before punishment was necessary (p.237, quote from Beard et al. rather than Pliny). Pliny himself offers his take on the issue:
"If they claimed [Christian faith], I repeated the question a second and third time, threatening them with capital punishment; those who persisted I ordered to be executed. For I had no hesitation... that that stubbornness and rigid obstinacy should certainly be punished."
150ish years later, Emperor Decius legally required all his subjects to offer a great sacrifice to the gods, and also to formally swear that they had sacrificed regularly throughout their lives (if they did so, they got a certificate signed by two officials. Kind of like a swimming certificate, I guess, but for sacrifices and with higher stakes than those generally entailed by failure to complete the 100m butterfly) (p.239).
"We should note, however, that Decius did not specify which gods were to be the recipients of the sacrifices- and it would seem that local gods were as acceptable as specifically Roman ones. In this case the demand was not that Christians should worship specifically Roman deities, but that they should participate in the sacrificial system as a whole with its offering of incense poured libations and and tasting of sacrificial meat. Sacrifice (not particular gods or festivals) here delimited and paraded the true subjects of Rome." (Beard et al. p.239)
Tacitus reports that the public had a mixed reaction to the executions of Christians. On the one hand, he notes that Christians were "hated for their vices". On the other hand, some pitied them- not because they thought they were innocent, but because they were killed "to gratify one man's cruelty, rather than serve the public good." (p.237)
*
Another useful thing about this chapter: it presents us with an emic binary dichotomy. These are brilliant for roleplayers (and, more generally, anyone who wants to convincingly fake an understanding of a foreign culture based on a strictly minimal level of research). Just look at the isfet / ma'at dichotomy. Anyone trying to describe some sort of fictionalised quasi-Ancient Egyptian culture can cheaply milk that one for months. (Etic binary dichotomies don't generally seem to work as well, which is possibly why Levi-Strauss never produced a successful rpg).
The framework presented here is that of religio vs superstitio. This apparently is not the same as religion vs superstition, or at least not in the modern sense of true worship vs delusionary beliefs (or not in pagan writings, anyway- apparently some Latin-speaking Christians used them in that sense. See p.216). From the sound of it, an approximate definition of a religiosae person might be "someone who is pious in the sense that they observe respectable rituals scrupulously but don't get carried away". Superstitio, meanwhile, sounds something like "the tendency to take part in rituals which involve getting overexcited and doing disreputable things, perhaps whilst in the company of foreigners". Women were thought to be more prone to superstitio than men.
It sounds as thought the question of whether a ritual counted as superstitio was to have been independent of the question of whether it actually worked (or whether the gods would hypothetically be pleased by it). Thus "excessive commitment" to worship could itself be a kind of superstitio (p.217). For emically-defined examples of superstitio, Seneca mentions the following:
- stories which describe the gods committing incest
- ritual self-mutilation
- "displays of grief at the death of Osiris"
- "various Jewish practices"
- excesses in the worship of the Roman gods- "go to the Capitoline [temple] and you will be ashamed of the madness on display... one servant informs Jupiter of the name of those who visit him, another tells him the time, one is his bather, another his anointer- at least he makes an empty gesture with his hands to indicate anointing." (1)
- vegetarianism
(1) Seneca's words, quoted p.218. Everything else quoted or paraphrased from Beard et al. p.218 and 229
The Elder Pliny also used the word in relation to magic, arguing that magic's falsehood had been extensively demonstrated by the amount of money which Nero had lavished on it with no obvious payoff (p.219). And in case you wondered, Christianity was respectively described by Tacitus and Pliny the Younger as "a deadly superstitio" and "a degenerate superstitio carried to extravagant lengths" (p.225).
Christianity wasn't the only superstitio to be illegal in some cases. For example, Tacitus records that Pomponia Graecina, wife of a prominent senator, was tried for superstitio (p.228). Meanwhile, Isis-worship was banned within the pomerium (sacred border of the city of Rome), and later within any place within a Roman mile of the city. This didn't prevent an AD 19 scandal, in which a high-status Roman lady and Isis-worshipper was tricked into having sex with a jilted suitor (he was disguised as Anubis at the time). Tiberius responded by destroying the temple in which the deception took place, crucifying the man's priest accomplices, and throwing a statue of Isis into the Tiber. Beard et al. also state that the Roman tendency to denigrate foreign religions (e.g. by referring to them as superstitio) picks up after the second century AD, maybe because Romans perceived a growing need to differentiate themselves from the provinces (p.221).
Certain types of astrology were also illegal in some periods (e.g. consultations that took place without witnesses, or attempts to predict someone's death- in particular, attempts by slaves to predict their masters' deaths). These potentially carried heavy punishments, although this was quite hard to enforce. Tacitus was of the opinion that astrologers in Rome "would always be banned and always retained" (p.230-2).
The Greeks apparently had a similar sense of respectable vs dodgy religious practice- for example, Plutarch advises that the good wife will avoid excessive ritual and foreign 'superstition', and only worship those gods whom her husband accepts (p.222). However, they don't seem to have a word which was a catch-all term for 'undesirable worship' in the same way that superstitio seems to have been- the word Plutarch uses is Deisidaimonia, literally "fear of the gods", and referring to "excessive or demeaning behaviour". Other words used by Greek writers to translate 'superstitio' included mataiotes (vanity) and atheotes (atheism). (p.225)
A final random thing- apparently "the number of surviving Latin curses (often scratched on lead tablets, and so preserved) increase greatly in number under the empire, and the Greek magical papyri from Egypt are most common in the third and fourth centuries AD." I wonder if anyone's tried any kind of quantitative studies on this sort of thing?
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